TROY UNIVERSITY
The High Tide Technology partnership Central to TROY’ s cybersecurity posture is its long-standing relationship with High Tide Technology, a cybersecurity firm that has partnered with the university for nearly two decades now. High Tide specialises in data governance, data security, regulatory compliance and formal security auditing.
“ We have a very keen relationship with them,” Greg says.“ Their experience in the higher education world, and TROY in particular, allows them to take an extraordinarily forward-leaning position.”
What distinguishes the partnership, in his view, is the balance it strikes between rigorous security and usability.“ We develop and deploy tools with High Tide Technology that protect our infrastructure without being intrusive,” he explains.
“ We never want to create an environment where our tools keep users from being able to use their environments properly, where they’ re viewed as an impediment or they create an opportunity for distrust among our user base.”
The importance of trust in corporate relationships is a recurring theme for Greg. For him, higher education institutions tend to operate with tighter budgets than commercial counterparts, which makes it all the more important to identify partners whose interests are genuinely aligned with shared success.
“ We need meaningful relationships with our vendors, not just a buyer-seller type arrangement,” he says.“ If it’ s an opportunity simply to make a few dollars and increase the bottom line, we try to avoid that as much as possible.”
Looking to the future Greg is optimistic about where education’ s relationship with technology is headed. He anticipates that barriers to access will continue to fall, bringing more people into the digital economy and forcing the technology industry to create simpler, more agile computing environments. He also expects the continued proliferation of AI tools, and the expanded reach of consumer technology, to transform the experience of education.
Above all, though, he believes that education is the most important thing.“ My sincere desire is that along the way, we underscore faith in this notion of higher education, and that people do not trivialise the importance of furthering their educational opportunities,” he says.“ We will see things like credentialling and micro-credentialling – shorter-term opportunities whereby students can achieve a meaningful credential outside of the typical window associated with higher education, where it’ s measured in years.”
For Greg, the road ahead is shaped by the same question that has guided his career since the mid-1990s: how do you make technology work so well that the people it serves never even have to think about it?
“ With a global student population,” he posits,“ our technology needs to be resilient, it needs to be redundant, but more importantly, it simply needs to work.” troy. edu 19