By David Kent, President, David Kent Consulting
Why modernizing your Banner ecosystem in the public cloud creates two critical runways for your institution’s future.
By David Kent, President, David Kent Consulting
Higher education institutions are facing some of the most consequential technology decisions in decades.
ERP and student information system vendors are promoting new platforms, accelerating their SaaS roadmaps, and encouraging institutions to make long-term commitments. Yet many of these next-generation platforms are still evolving, leaving institutions to make decisions about systems that may shape their operations for decades.
Meanwhile, institutional leaders face immediate pressures to improve student experiences, strengthen analytics, embrace artificial intelligence, and control costs.
Institutions cannot afford to stand still while waiting for the ERP/SIS market to mature. But neither should they be forced into premature platform decisions simply to move forward.
There is a better strategy.
Modernizing the Ellucian Banner ecosystem in the public cloud creates two distinct and valuable runways: one that makes Banner more efficient and sustainable, and another that enables institutional innovation while the next generation of ERP/SIS platforms matures.
Runway One: Make Ellucian Banner Better, More Efficient, and More Sustainable
Ellucian Banner continues to support mission-critical operations at hundreds of colleges and universities. Yet many institutions operate it on aging infrastructure, with architectures designed around the limitations of traditional data centers.
Computing resources are provisioned for peak demand, even though those peaks occur only periodically. Hardware requires maintenance and replacement. Disaster recovery can be expensive and complicated. And valuable IT resources are consumed maintaining infrastructure rather than improving institutional services.
Properly modernizing Banner in the public cloud changes that equation.
Institutions can gain:
- Elastic computing: Scale capacity for registration, payroll, and other peak workloads without maintaining peak-sized infrastructure year-round.
- Greater efficiency: Automate infrastructure management, deployments, monitoring, and routine operations.
- Improved resilience: Implement more sophisticated disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities.
- Better cost management: Align cloud resources with actual demand rather than continuously paying for unused capacity.
- Greater flexibility: Reduce dependence on aging infrastructure while maintaining institutional control.
The result is a more efficient, scalable, and sustainable Banner environment.
More importantly, it gives the institution time to evaluate its ERP/SIS future deliberately, rather than making a rushed decision driven by infrastructure limitations or vendor pressure.
That’s the Banner runway.
Relocation Is Not Modernization. And the Difference Is Enormous.
Here’s where institutions need to be particularly careful.
Most Banner cloud migration proposals are really relocation projects. They take the existing Banner environment, move its servers and applications into cloud-based virtual machines, and declare the migration complete. This approach is often called “lift and shift”.
The institution gets a new address for Banner, but inherits the same architecture, the same inefficiencies, and the same operational limitations.
That is not modernization. And it leaves much of the public cloud’s potential unrealized.
At David Kent Consulting, we take a fundamentally different approach.
Rather than relocating Banner first and proposing modernization as a separate project sometime down the road, we modernize the entire Banner ecosystem in one coordinated transformation, in as little as 14 weeks.
Our Smart Migration methodology rearchitects the application environment to leverage cloud-native capabilities, including containerization, workload elasticity, automation, comprehensive observability, and multi-region disaster recovery.
The result isn’t simply Banner running somewhere else. It’s a more efficient, scalable, resilient, and sustainable Banner ecosystem, along with the cloud foundation needed to support institutional innovation.
Why pay to move yesterday’s architecture into tomorrow’s cloud, only to pay again to modernize it later?
Institutions should demand more from their cloud investments.
Relocation changes where Banner runs. Modernization changes what Banner, and your institution,can do.
Runway Two: Innovate While the ERP/SIS Market Matures
For too long, institutions have tied their ability to innovate to the capabilities and release schedules of their ERP and SIS vendors.
Need better analytics? Wait for the next reporting platform.
Want to introduce artificial intelligence? Wait for the vendor’s AI roadmap.
Need more automation or better student services? Add those requirements to the next ERP selection process.
But why should institutional innovation have to wait?
An institution’s ability to innovate should not be constrained by the maturity of the ERP/SIS market, or the development roadmap of any single vendor.
A properly modernized public cloud environment creates an entirely new foundation for innovation, independent of the current ERP or SIS.
Institutions can begin building:
- Enterprise analytics and data platforms that integrate information across Banner and other institutional systems, improving reporting and decision-making.
- AI and predictive capabilities that support student success, enrollment planning, financial analysis, and administrative operations.
- Workflow automation that eliminates repetitive manual processes and improves operational efficiency.
- Modern applications and digital experiences that better serve students, faculty, and staff without waiting for the next ERP.
These capabilities can be designed to remain valuable regardless of which ERP or SIS the institution eventually adopts.
This is the innovation runway.
The institution doesn’t have to choose between waiting for the ERP/SIS market to mature and moving forward with innovation. It can do both.
And perhaps most importantly, the innovation investments made today need not be discarded when Banner is eventually replaced.
With thoughtful architecture, data platforms, integrations, automation, and institutional expertise can carry forward into the next generation of enterprise systems.
Modernize Now. Decide Later.
Every institution eventually needs to evaluate its ERP and SIS future.
But those decisions should be made when both the institution is ready and the market offers sufficiently mature solutions -not because aging infrastructure or a vendor’s roadmap forces its hand.
Modernizing Banner creates the breathing room to make those decisions intelligently.
The institution can continue operating Banner efficiently while evaluating emerging ERP/SIS offerings, improving data governance, modernizing business processes, and preparing for organizational change.
Meanwhile, the innovation runway allows the institution to move forward with analytics, AI, automation, and digital transformation today.
Innovation doesn’t have to wait for the next ERP. And the next ERP decision shouldn’t have to be rushed to enable innovation.
That’s the strategic value of the two-runway approach.
Two Runways. One Better Future.
Modernizing Banner isn’t simply about extending the life of an existing enterprise system.
It’s about creating an institutional advantage.
The Banner runway delivers the efficiency, resilience, and sustainability needed to operate confidently today.
The innovation runway enables institutions to build tomorrow’s capabilities while allowing the ERP/SIS market to mature.
Together, they provide something far more valuable than a cloud migration: the ability to make progress today without compromising tomorrow’s choices.
Don’t simply relocate Banner. Modernize it.
Don’t wait for the ERP/SIS market to mature before innovating.
And don’t let a vendor’s roadmap dictate your institution’s future.
Modernize Now. Decide Later.
David Kent Consulting helps higher education institutions modernize their Banner ecosystems, establish public cloud innovation foundations, and develop strategies for their ERP/SIS futures.
Let’s discuss how our Smart Migration approach can create both runways for your institution.
David Kent Consulting
Higher Education Systems, Strategy, and Solutions.
Key Takeaways
- Two runways, one foundation: Banner cloud modernization creates a more efficient, resilient Ellucian Banner environment and, in parallel, a public cloud foundation for analytics, AI, and automation that does not depend on any ERP or SIS vendor’s roadmap.
- Relocation is not modernization: a lift-and-shift Banner cloud migration moves the same architecture and inefficiencies into virtual machines. Modernization rearchitects Banner with containerization, workload elasticity, automation, observability, and multi-region disaster recovery.
- Pay for actual demand: elastic cloud capacity lets institutions scale for registration, payroll, and other peak periods instead of running peak-sized infrastructure year-round.
- One coordinated project: David Kent Consulting’s Smart Migration methodology modernizes the full Banner ecosystem at once, in as little as 14 weeks for a properly scoped environment, rather than relocating first and paying to modernize later.
- Modernize now, decide later: data platforms, integrations, and automation built on a modern cloud foundation can carry forward when Banner is eventually replaced, so the next ERP decision does not have to be rushed.
About David Kent
David Kent is the founder and president of David Kent Consulting, Inc., a higher education technology consulting firm that has served more than 200 colleges and universities. For more than 25 years, he has helped institutions navigate ERP and SIS strategy, cloud modernization, integration, and enterprise technology decisions. David is a strong advocate for institution-led strategy, practical modernization, and maintaining independence from vendor-driven roadmaps and artificial timelines.
About David Kent Consulting
David Kent Consulting is an independent higher education technology firm whose practitioners have supported more than 200 institutions over two decades. The firm works across Ellucian Banner, Degree Works, Workday, Oracle, and financial aid systems. Its cloud practice rearchitects Banner environments in the public cloud through its Smart Migration methodology, and its ERP and SIS strategy advisory helps leadership teams decide what to modernize now and what to decide later, on a timeline the institution controls.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Banner cloud modernization?
Banner cloud modernization is the process of rearchitecting an Ellucian Banner environment to use cloud-native capabilities in the public cloud, rather than moving existing servers into virtual machines unchanged. It typically includes containerization, elastic scaling for peak workloads, infrastructure automation, observability, and multi-region disaster recovery. The result is a more efficient and resilient Banner environment plus a foundation for analytics, AI, and automation.
What is “lift and shift,” and why does it fall short for Ellucian Banner?
Lift and shift, also called rehosting, moves Banner and its supporting infrastructure to the public cloud without fundamentally changing how the environment operates. The institution brings along the same legacy architecture, oversized servers, manual processes, inefficiencies, and operational limitations it was trying to escape in the first place. The result? Banner has a new address, but the institution is still operating under the same old model, only now with cloud consumption charges that can make those inefficiencies even more expensive. Relocation doesn’t solve the underlying problems. It simply moves them. True modernization is fundamentally different. It rearchitects the Banner ecosystem to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities, including automation, elasticity, improved resilience, and more efficient resource utilization. Why pay to relocate yesterday’s problems into tomorrow’s cloud, only to pay again to modernize them later?
What are the “7 Rs” of cloud migration, and where does Banner modernization fit?
AWS Prescriptive Guidance groups cloud migration strategies into seven “Rs”: retire, retain, rehost, relocate, repurchase, replatform, and refactor (or re-architect). A relocation-style Banner migration maps to rehost or relocate. Banner cloud modernization combines the move with replatform and refactor work in one project, so the institution does not pay to migrate first and modernize later.
Do we need to move to Banner SaaS to get the benefits of the cloud?
No. An institution can run its own Banner environment in the public cloud and gain elastic computing, automation, stronger disaster recovery, and better cost management without re-implementing Banner as Ellucian’s SaaS offering. A modernized Banner environment also keeps the institution in control of its customizations, integrations, and upgrade timing. Whether SaaS is the right long-term destination is a separate decision the institution can make when it is ready.
Will modernizing Banner now be wasted if we replace our ERP later?
Not if the architecture is designed for it. Data platforms, integrations, automation, and the cloud operating expertise an institution builds during Banner modernization can carry forward to the next ERP or SIS. Modernizing now also gives leadership time to evaluate emerging platforms deliberately instead of deciding under infrastructure or vendor pressure.
Can a Banner institution start using AI and analytics before choosing a new ERP?
Yes. A modernized public cloud environment lets institutions build enterprise analytics, predictive models, and workflow automation that draw on Banner and other institutional systems, independent of any single vendor’s AI roadmap. Designed well, these capabilities remain useful regardless of which ERP or SIS the institution eventually adopts.
