Published on: June 10, 2025
7 min read
AI-native GitLab Premium: Transform higher education software development
The DevSecOps platform's enterprise-grade features for academic workflows, data protection, and support ensure better collaboration, security, and efficiency.
Educational institutions increasingly rely on modern software development practices to support teaching, research, and administrative functions. As development needs grow more complex in university and college environments, GitLab Premium with Duo provides essential capabilities that address the unique challenges faced by higher education – particularly around open source development, remote collaboration, and enterprise-grade security.
GitLab's comprehensive, intelligent DevSecOps platform delivers value that extends far beyond fundamental version control. Built on an open source foundation with enterprise-grade features, GitLab Premium helps prevent costly security incidents involving student data, provides cloud-based development environments for distributed teams, and offers the professional support that educational institutions need for mission-critical systems. And now Premium includes GitLab Duo AI essentials Code Suggestions and Chat at no additional cost.
The unique development environment in higher education
Universities and colleges operate in a distinctly challenging technical environment. Development teams must support multidisciplinary collaboration across technical and non-technical departments while managing vast amounts of sensitive data – from student records and financial information to research findings and faculty evaluations.
Most institutions face these challenges with limited IT resources, yet must support thousands of concurrent users across numerous projects and research initiatives. Research integrity requirements add another layer of complexity, as development work often needs to maintain traceability and reproducibility standards.
Premium solutions for educational institutions
GitLab Premium with Duo has the functionality that higher education needs.
Enhanced collaboration and workflow capabilities
Cross-departmental projects are common in educational settings – from multi-department research initiatives to custom module development for systems like Ellucian Banner, an enterprise resource planning application used by higher education. These complex projects require sophisticated workflow management that goes beyond basic version control.
GitLab Premium addresses these challenges with powerful collaboration and project visualization features, including epics, roadmaps, and advanced Kanban boards for Agile development workflows. When you assign multiple approvers to certain merge requests and protected branches, you ensure higher code quality and accountability across teams. These tools allow institutions to coordinate work across departments while aligning with institution-wide objectives – essential for managing multiphase campus technology initiatives.
In Australia, Deakin University’s enablement team uses GitLab to build standardized processes and reusable templates — such as custom merge request templates, templated build pipelines, and a security and compliance framework — that can be shared with the broader university community and citizen developers, driving innovation and collaboration both inside the university and with key partners. “We were trying to bring in a community of practice and help it thrive for quite some time, but we were never successful until we had this tool,” said Aaron Whitehand, director of Digital Enablement at Deakin University.
Read more about how Deakin University uses GitLab to drive improvements in collaboration and productivity, including a 60% reduction in manual tasks.
Advanced data protection and governance
Educational institutions generate and manage vast amounts of data, ranging from student records and financial information to research findings and faculty evaluations. The security stakes are particularly high. The 2023 MOVEit breach, which spanned three months and compromised approximately 900 educational institutions, exposed the sensitive information of more than 62 million people. This demonstrates the critical need for proactive security measures integrated directly into higher education development workflows.
Vulnerability scanning stops code releases that contain security risks, enabling institutions to establish and enforce governance protocols that protect sensitive information. These capabilities help universities implement proper access controls and permission structures for research databases, creating a secure framework where authorized researchers maintain appropriate access – effectively balancing robust protection with necessary collaboration.
GitLab is built from the ground up to secure your source code. Scalable Git-based repositories, granular access controls, and built-in compliance features eliminate bottlenecks in your workflow while meeting security requirements. GitLab Premium provides audit tracking and compliance capabilities essential for educational environments. Complete audit trails capture detailed logs of all code changes, access attempts, and system modifications with timestamps and user attribution. Full change management documentation ensures traceability of who made what changes, when, and why – critical for research integrity – while access control auditing monitors repository access and permissions changes.
Cloud-based development environments and remote collaboration
Modern educational institutions require flexible development environments that support distributed teams, remote learning scenarios, and diverse technical requirements. GitLab Premium provides:
- GitLab Workspaces: Cloud-based development environments accessible from any device
- Web IDE integration: Browser-based coding with full GitLab feature integration
- Container-based development: Consistent, reproducible development environments across different projects and user groups
These capabilities are particularly valuable for supporting remote and hybrid learning models, enabling students and researchers to access standardized development environments regardless of their physical location or local hardware constraints.
Professional support for critical systems
Small IT teams in educational settings often support large, complex infrastructure with minimal resources. Reaching out to user forums for answers doesn't always mean you'll get an accurate reply and isn't efficient for large teams. GitLab Premium includes dedicated professional support, providing faster issue resolution and upgrade assistance during critical periods like class enrollment or research deadlines.
This minimizes downtime for critical services and ensures continuity of operations during peak usage periods, giving stretched IT departments the enterprise-grade reliability they need for essential academic systems.
Built on open source with enterprise capabilities
Open source software is developed collaboratively in a public manner, with source code freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. This development model fosters innovation through community contributions and ensures transparency in how software functions. GitLab's open source foundation resonates strongly with educational institutions' values around collaboration, transparency, and community contribution. GitLab Premium features extend this foundation with enterprise-grade capabilities while maintaining the ability to contribute back to the open source ecosystem.
Key open source advantages include:
- Transparency: Complete visibility into platform capabilities and security measures – you can examine exactly how the software works
- Community contribution: Ability to contribute improvements back to the broader community and benefit from global developer expertise
- Vendor independence: Reduced lock-in risk with open source alternatives and the freedom to modify code as needed
- Co-creation opportunities: Collaborative development with the broader community, including other educational institutions, to build shared solutions
AI assistant for software development tasks
GitLab Premium with Duo brings powerful AI-native capabilities directly into the development workflow, including:
- Code Suggestions, which provides real-time code completion and suggestions, helping developers write code faster and more efficiently
- Chat, which allows team members to get instant answers to questions, troubleshoot issues, and access documentation directly within the GitLab environment
These AI tools significantly enhance productivity, reduce errors, and streamline collaboration, making GitLab Premium an even more valuable asset for software development teams in higher education.
Transparency at the core
Higher education institutions handle incredibly sensitive data — from student records and research findings to proprietary academic work and federal grant information.
The GitLab AI Transparency Center demonstrates our commitment to transparency, accountability, and protection of customer data and intellectual property, providing the privacy guarantees that educational institutions require.
GitLab launched the AI Transparency Center to help customers, community, and team members better understand how GitLab upholds ethics and transparency in our AI-powered features.
Our publicly available documentation highlights the comprehensive measures we take to protect your institution's data and intellectual property. GitLab's AI Ethics Principles for Product Development guide us as we continue to build and evolve our AI functionality, helping higher education organizations harness the promise of AI while maintaining complete control and oversight of their most valuable information assets.
Get started with GitLab Premium today
For educational institutions, GitLab Premium with Duo represents a strategic technical investment that combines the benefits of open source development with enterprise-grade, AI-native capabilities. By providing professional-grade tools ready for the challenges familiar to the complex technical environment of higher education, GitLab Premium with Duo helps institutions address security vulnerabilities, streamline development workflows, and maintain the reliable infrastructure that academic and research operations depend on.
Learn more about GitLab for Public Sector or speak to our sales team today.