How do you manage a MAT (the IT portion anyway!)

[Sibrows]

So I'm after some of the collective wisdom of those who've been here before...

 

We're a relativley new MAT (less than a year into existance at this stage) and we're looking at centralising a number of the IT functions:

• Internet connectivity - currently investigating a VPLS which should allow the following.
  
• Centralised backups for our primaries.
  
• Centralised support - both end user and infrastructure.
  
• Centralised procurement
  
• Centralised services - phone systems, email (O365), speciffic software (finance software etc...)
  

 

This leads on to various questions:

1. What software are people using for the following tasks?
   


1. Site-to-site server backups
   
2. Central workstation backups for laptops
   
3. Multi-site software distribution
   
4. Multi-site intrusion detection (someone give me a free easy to setup piece of software that doesn't break everything - I think not!)
   
5. Mobile and removable device encryption
   

 

[*]What technical issues have people had to overcome merging multiple schools?

1. Did you merge active directory domains or implement any form of trust relationship?
   
2. Do you apply a one size fits most to all schools or opt to support each school as a seperate entity?
   

 

[*]What haven't I though of?

 

As a bit of background its 2 secondary schools and 10+ primary schools.

 

Sorry that got a little bit longer than I'd planned.

 

Any comments on the above would be appreciated.

 

Simon

[Katy]

Can't answer most of those as I work in a school rather than at the trust, but we were put onto MPLS which linked all schools back to a data centre with a single AD forest, then one child domain per school. They also provided Internet and centralised filtering this way.

 

However... as it's grown huge (currently about 60 schools) the newer additions were brought on with their own internet connections and Meraki VPN devices to get them onto the WAN, they also relaxed the AD rules and ended up just putting trusts in between the existing new school forest and the existing trust forest. We have now all moved off the MPLS as it cost a fortune and all connect in with VPNs.

 

I would probably say for the size you'd want to set up an AD forest with a forest root domain for the trust staff, then a child domain for each school (so each school can host its own domain's AD servers etc). This would then mean you can give any local IT staff domain admin rights to their own school domain, and the trust central IT staff can have Enterprise Admin rights in the root domain automatically giving them rights to the child domains. If you're not doing them from scratch then you'd have to make do with trusts or have an account for each central person on each school network.

[FN-GM]

Hello,

 

I work for a MAT, I setup the service for myself. We centralize all those services as well as a few other services such as digital signage.

 

What software are people using for the following tasks?

Site-to-site server backups - DPM

Central workstation backups for laptops - No data stored locally so no backup required.

Multi-site software distribution - SCCM

Multi-site intrusion detection (someone give me a free easy to setup piece of software that doesn't break everything - I think not!) - We have it on the internet firewalls, the internal wan is a private WAN and traffic is routed via L3 switches.

Mobile and removable device encryption - Bitlocker & built in phone encryption.

 

What technical issues have people had to overcome merging multiple schools?

Did you merge active directory domains or implement any form of trust relationship? - All one domain. Makes things easier for IT and the end users who roam between sites.

Do you apply a one size fits most to all schools or opt to support each school as a seperate entity? - One size fits all mainly, we don't have complaints about it.