Everything In The Cloud - Best Way?

[gopackgo]

I am curious what some of you have in your technology plan looking down the road the next year or two.

 

We all know that cloud seems to be the way everything is going. My question is how much do you guys plan on relying on cloud only for services leaving your infrastructure needs pretty much limited to needing network/internet connectivity and some printing capability. With students able to share docs/homework with teachers via google docs printing out homework really wouldn't be necessary.

 

So, are you guys planning on a complete transition to cloud only? Are you planning on a transition to something like a chromebook and/or android tablet for each student with no more computer labs?

[localzuk]

Not gonna happen here. We have no plans to 'cloudify' anything here. I simply couldn't trust our internet connection for it.

 

Instead, we have everything hosted in-house, with students able to access that externally. By outsourcing to Cloud, you get rid of control and that's something we're not willing to do yet.

[SYNACK]

No cloud here either for the same reasons, they can still access everything remotely because our internet connection works both ways, we can get stuff from the internet (revolutionary I know), like cloud stuff if we wanted and also share services from inside out. We get many things from having possession of it ourselves the main one being power over it and accountability. Most cloud providers will happily give you an SLA of when we get to it and you have no other options. Our internet connections are not fantastic and our bandwidth is worse. Sure there is a bottleneck either way but with our setup its not when the students are at school trying to do work. At home you are less likely to get a whole school load of people hitting it at the same time and it means you can use fun stuff like HD video and big documents without melting the internet connection. It also means that if the internet connection goes down the whole school is not paralyzed without services. It is bad enough now when the internet links fail let alone if every little thing was out there.

 

You also have the issue of trusting an American company to play by any other rules than their own, sure there is safe harbour etc. but if they really wanted to that would wash away very quickly with a decent amount of government pressure.

 

The 'cloud' may have some good points but it has a hell of a lot of bad ones too not least the degeneration of decisions to an external party which always works out sooo well.

[Gibson335]

Approach with caution...keep an eye on continual development...consider and debate some cloud movement (depending on what is meant by 'cloud')...but I do not foresse a day in the near future when everything we have, specifically curriculum-specific software, can be cloud-based. Is making GoogleApps/GoogleDrive available considered 'cloud', for instance? If so, we're there...but have retained and intend to retain Office and remote access via TS.

[Cache]

I haven't any plans to transition everything across to the cloud, obviously that can be taken out of my hands but then I wouldn't remain here much longer if it was.

 

We're currently considering opening up Office 365 and Google Apps for education to link into the google accounts for things like AppInventor and using Google sites and using email through Office 365, but that's as far as I'm planing to go at the moment. The Office 365 for the exchange like features plus more storage then I could even consider offering internally. At the moment we don't have any internal email system anyway so that isn't so much of a huge shift for us.

 

I don't like the idea of transitioning everything out of the environment, being at somebody elses whim in terms of what can happen and also becoming reliant upon a service which should a company not like any more they could pretty easily close down and you'd be left hanging.

 

Maybe I'm too negative on it, but it doesn't hold my confidence still.

[edutech4schools]

My schools use gapps for email, sites, calendar but docs is only used for the governors, everything else is in-house.

[Grey-gear]

That I know off the cloud storge is used by the SLT team for their own documents but there seems to be no plan to extend that, one of the primary schools the school provides IT support too is though so I watching to see how they handle it. So to answer the question I don't come across it all to offen and for now there is no plan to move to that kind of service.

[Meldrew]

Not gonna happen here. We have no plans to 'cloudify' anything here. I simply couldn't trust our internet connection for it.

 

Instead, we have everything hosted in-house, with students able to access that externally. By outsourcing to Cloud, you get rid of control and that's something we're not willing to do yet.

 

Me too. I'd rather have everything where I KNOW its being backed up, etc etc.

 

Meldrew

[mats]

We've got an internet connection from RM here. Moving to a system which depended on it being up all the time would be utterly bonkers.

[edutech4schools]

The secondary school down the road from me is completely Google cloud based but I have no idea how they are finding it.

[dhicks]

With students able to share docs/homework with teachers via google docs printing out homework really wouldn't be necessary.

 

The problem is in the retention of all that data. I'm assuming that we're going to have to retain a pupil's work for at least the time they are at the school plus a bit more, so that's around 10 years at my current school. When you add photos and videos of children into that figure, "cloud" storage starts to get expensive. I can, however, colocate a decent sized (40TB) server (costing £3,000) in Docklands for around £1200 a year with a 3TB a month data allowance, which compares favorably with cloud storage prices.

[localzuk]

The problem is in the retention of all that data. I'm assuming that we're going to have to retain a pupil's work for at least the time they are at the school plus a bit more, so that's around 10 years at my current school. When you add photos and videos of children into that figure, "cloud" storage starts to get expensive. I can, however, colocate a decent sized (40TB) server (costing £3,000) in Docklands for around £1200 a year with a 3TB a month data allowance, which compares favorably with cloud storage prices.

 

Which is basically a private cloud solution then... Which would beg the question as to why you'd do that, rather than have it in your server room like most of us do now?

[SYNACK]

Which is basically a private cloud solution then... Which would beg the question as to why you'd do that, rather than have it in your server room like most of us do now?

 

Why not both if you are really pushing the whole distributed, inside outside flow thing. This is the kind of thing where I think big la broadband providers could make themselves really useful by offering colocation so you can have a mirrored service infrastructure if you want to. Best of both worlds unless you like that helpless feeling of the nebulous cloud.

[Ephelyon]

For me the Cloud is something you move to if you are a small startup or you have an issue with an area of your existing infrastructure, i.e. it is overpriced or underperforming (or both). Maybe a Cloud-based solution offers more features (but are they features you couldn't get in-house?), or maybe your Internet connection or backup arrangements are poor and the initial outlay of bringing them up to scratch is prohibitive so you could benefit from using someone else's infrastructure. The issue with the PATRIOT Act and the like doesn't have to be a problem for a British school if you use a European-hosted Cloud service that's decent (like... ermmm...).

 

If your infrastructure is fine, however, I don't really see the point. As NM I've spent the past three years building up an infrastructure that works well and runs itself a lot of the time; I see no advantage in using someone else's when the downside is that it introduces a certain degree of dependence and lack of fine-grained control on our part. Also, the way we've been able to structure our backup arrangements means our data retention is often greater than your average Cloud-hosted solution will offer, offsite too because the County has unthrottled the broadband link between ourselves and another local school to 100Mb in the evenings and at weekends so we can colocate servers between our respective sites to back up to.

 

This is all aside from the massive middle-finger it represents to whose of us who had been hoping for a long and prosperous career in technical architecture, infrastructure design and technological leadership for a single client, thank you very much.

Edited April 9, 2013 by Ephelyon

[truebluesteve]

We have a Governor who works for IBM as a "consultant" who believes the only way forward is the cloud. Thing is he has no idea how schools work in terms of IT provision and is too opinionated and arrogant to ask (this was also the view of the last Head!) so it has been a battle at times to convince others that it isn't a panacea.

 

I like to keep an open mind on all things IT but with a healthy dose of scepticism too, especially when the next great idea comes out! I think we will move a lot of our backups to the cloud by the end of the summer, but that's really because it is easier to manage. Other than that I like to keep stuff in house so we have control over it.

[plexer]

You still have control if it's in the cloud, yes I agree that the cloud shouldn't be seen as a solution for everything but purples attitudes that they lose control seem odd.

 

Ben

[Ephelyon]

It depends on how granular their control needs to be. I use Transport Rules to manage pupil e-mail bans and silent message forwarding in concerning cases using Exchange, for example, which is (mostly) possible with Office 365 but not offered by Google Apps / GMail.

 

Or they may find themselves in an environment where less-enlightened leaders will blame the internal IT department for a Microsoft/Google/other service outage even when there's nothing they can do...

[localzuk]

It depends on how granular their control needs to be. I use Transport Rules to manage pupil e-mail bans and silent message forwarding in concerning cases using Exchange, for example, which is (mostly) possible with Office 365 but not offered by Google Apps / GMail.

 

Not sure what you mean - Google Apps can have rules for silently forwarding emails (eg. if they contain certain words etc...).

[dhicks]

Which is basically a private cloud solution then...

 

Depends on your definition of "cloud" - I'd stick to Amazon's definition, where a server instance (of which there might be many) starts without directly attached storage and is expected to associate itself with some at run time. The above is simply a server, with some disks attached, that's avaulable somewhere on the Internet.

 

Which would beg the question as to why you'd do that, rather than have it in your server room like most of us do now?

 

In case of fire / flood / plauge in our server cupboard.

[truebluesteve]

You still have control if it's in the cloud, yes I agree that the cloud shouldn't be seen as a solution for everything but purples attitudes that they lose control seem odd.

 

Ben

 

Well you have control as long as you have an Internet connection or there aren't any issues at the "cloud" end.

[truebluesteve]

Depends on your definition of "cloud" - I'd stick to Amazon's definition, where a server instance (of which there might be many) starts without directly attached storage and is expected to associate itself with some at run time. The above is simply a server, with some disks attached, that's avaulable somewhere on the Internet.

 

 

 

In case of fire / flood / plauge in our server cupboard.

 

Plagues are a real concern for me - those locusts can cause havoc

[EduTech]

Having everything in the cloud requires some serious planning, thought and work in order for it to work, which to be honest due to some area's still in development it's not a wise decision to make although you can make a good start with some of the great services that are available to you at the moment.

 

Microsoft Office 365 Academic Plans provide you with Exchange/Lync/SharePoint & SkyDrive Pro for FREE which to be honest covers most services that you use in a school and are placed within a reliable global infrastructure, that you do have management over and even more so with Hybrid Deployments you can have the option to keep some mailboxes On-Premise if you so wish!

 

That leaves most of you to look after SIMS, AD/DNS/DHCP & File Services.... I assume some major upgrades will be coming to SIMS at some point which will make that cloud based although you could also look at other options such as Follett. AD will stay OnPrem as will DNS/DHCP and then File Services you may choose to move to SkyDrive / SharePoint although there is nothing wrong with keeping this OnPrem.

 

I know you have things such as Desktop Applications and probably other services which I have forgotten about been a while since I worked in EDU now but you get the idea.. You can move, and you can do it in a phased approach with the right planning and thought and using solutions that have been proved to work!..

 

Windows Azure has some cool things available to you which many people seem to be scared to look at! ;-) and don't forget Windows InTune.

 

Regards,

James.

[SovietRussia]

We have here a Hybrid Cloud, a public and private combined. We allow all users to access documents via our own, custom built web based remote solution - Public and also allow staff our own VPN configuration that we built using the web - Private.

 

I think the future is cloud based computing, look at the way other companies and pretty big tech players are going, you will soon be creating user accounts and setting GPOs on a web interface pretty soon, this is the way its going - No specific device restricted applications and webapps.

Edited April 10, 2013 by SovietRussia

[Ephelyon]

Not sure what you mean - Google Apps can have rules for silently forwarding emails (eg. if they contain certain words etc...).

 

Sure, it has from/to etc, plus contents, but I'm thinking of a few I have on our Exchange where it needs to be "between distlist and distlist" or rules that allow pupils to send/receive with teachers and receive from pupils, but not send to pupils (owing to abuse); it's an important part of our e-mail sanctions policy. It doesn't look that granular from what I've seen.

Edited April 10, 2013 by Ephelyon

[edutech4schools]

Sure, it has from/to etc, plus contents, but I'm thinking of a few I have on our Exchange where it needs to be "between distlist and distlist" or rules that allow pupils to send/receive with teachers and receive from pupils, but not send to pupils (owing to abuse); it's an important part of our e-mail sanctions policy. It doesn't look that granular from what I've seen.

 

I think that can all be controlled in the admin panel and can be set based on OU group etc. Not used this feature myself so could be off the mark but found it under settings / gmail settings / routing which brings up a list of routing settings.

 

The ability to apply the settings to a group must be new as I have not seen that before but I rarely go browsing around the admin panel.