Azure for Education

[SchoolsBroadband]

Afternoon all,

 

I'm doing some research into IaaS platforms as this may be something we look to offer you all in the future. I'll probably do a poll and ask a number of questions but in the mean time could any of you let me know your experience in outsourcing your serves to Microsoft Azure?

 

Has it been good? What servers have you moved to the cloud? What applications have you kept locally? And finally how much do you spend with them and what are the prices MS give you under which licensing agreement?

 

if you'd prefer to PM me then all information will be kept confidential.

 

Thanks for your help as always and glad I'm part of the Edugeek community

 

Dave

[Oaktech]

I'm going to start using Azure shortly to provide AD sync for O365. with the capability and price of internet connections in my area it's the only thing I can justify doing. I can't move anything off site as I can't afford the bandwidth to get it back on site again to use it. I suspect a lot of smaller schools will be in the same boat! I have no pressing need for staff to use applications off site that can't be dealt with by a few remote desktop sessions.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Thanks for that @Oaktech

 

Not to take the subject off topic but if your primary schools had 100Mbit for £5kpa do you think that would be A) affordable and B) justify moving to cloud based services as you can offset server rentals against capex and onsite maintenance costs?

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Oaktech]

Thanks for that @Oaktech

 

Not to take the subject off topic but if your primary schools had 100Mbit for £5kpa do you think that would be A) affordable and B) justify moving to cloud based services as you can offset server rentals against capex and onsite maintenance costs?

 

Thanks

 

Dave

 

It's something we will look at in the future certainly.

 

We are waiting for the dust to settle on a move to 100mbit internet that is happening now before looking too much further forward, but we are already looking at offsite backups. I need to get a feel for exactly how much up/down bandwidth is being used by general browsing, internal hosting, phones and backups and then we can begin to see clearer if it is technically desirable as well as cost effective and beneficial to work flow to move servers and services off site.