Columbia College Chicago Selects QTS for Long-Term Hybrid IT Data Center Roadmap

Columbia College Chicago, one of Chicago’s top creative academic institutions, has selected QTS to consolidate its IT infrastructure environments and provide a flexible and scalable outsourced hybrid IT data center solution.

Founded in 1890, Columbia College Chicago is an internationally-recognized academic institution and pioneer in arts and media education. The academic institution is a private, nonprofit college offering a distinctive curriculum that blends creative and media arts, liberal arts and business for 8,000 students in more than 100 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. In 2015, it launched a five-year Strategic Plan, which calls for modernizing the college’s technology infrastructure, among other long-term growth strategies.

QTS’ Chicago data center will host Columbia College’s IT environment, including deployment of disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) to enable rapid failover and recovery of the college’s IT environment to QTS’ mega data center in Suwanee, Ga.

qts data centers“QTS’ broad range of scalable and integrated IT infrastructure services will help consolidate our various IT systems, provide a long-term hybrid IT solution and lead the college into a 21st century technology environment,” said Byron Nash, Chief Information Officer (CIO), Columbia College Chicago. “As our requirements grow and our needs change, QTS will provide flexibility by enabling portability of existing IT services, particularly as it relates to cloud solutions.”

QTS DRaaS would protect mission-critical workloads and applications to improve IT resiliency and performance. Over time, Columbia College Chicago plans to consolidate additional disparate IT infrastructure into QTS Chicago followed by migration to the cloud with QTS.

“We are pleased that our combination of mega scale data center capacity and a fully integrated platform is able to deliver flexible yet tailored hybrid IT infrastructure solutions that align with Columbia’s long-term requirements,” said Dan Bennewitz, Chief Operating Officer (COO), Sales, Product and Marketing, QTS. “QTS’ Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery solution is a great example of this and is an increasingly critical element to many of our enterprise customers’ needing a partner for the end-to-end management of their IT applications.”