Your future plans for cloud / Azure / Google?

[MrWu]

Hi all

 

At the moment my school (1500 users approx) are on Office 365, hybrid exchange, on prem SIMS etc

 

Email is used quite happily through 365 at the moment and a few are using shared Office documents day to day.

 

I think my Bursars plan to move the whole lot into the cloud has tempered down a bit looking at latency and performance .

 

So we are now looking at ways we can move ahead, he would still like the idea in the event of a total school burn down, we can spool up servers in Azure or whatever to get going. But day to day have the benefit of speed of having file servers on premise..

Also SMT would like to use Outlook client and have the old school attach files from departmental drives easily. (easy on OneDrive, not so easy when testing this on Sharepoint Online drives)

 

We do use Azure replication to backup our VMs onto the cloud for SIMS, Finance and AD servers, so my natural thought is to scale that up and replicate the file servers and other functions too. So in the event of total school server room meltdown, all these VM should be able to boot up on Azure and run (we have tested this on our SIMS server before, and it works)

 

Costly ? Any thoughts?

 

Thank you as always

 

Wil

[DGardiner]

Were on a slow burn towards going full google, staff training has started pupil onboarding has started where staff are interested in google classroom etc, all our MIS are cloud based, most software is cloud based - next will come chromebooks/neverware and i hope to completely remove Microsoft from the premises at each school when they're each ready to do so.

 

Central trust functions minus the finance department are starting to do everything on drive in google docs after having some training and realising the quality of life benefits/time they could save

[AlanD]

As always. You need to think about where would you be in an ideal world? Then think about how you get from where you are to where you want to be. The problem, as I see it, is that the ideal world as imagined is just illusory.

Even starting from a clean sheet, its really hard to provide everything that everyone wants if you start with the premise that everything is going to be cloud based.

My guess, is that SLT want an IT system where they can go out, buy a PC, connect it up, enter the school email address - and it sets itself up and configures itself to work automatically. Not a network manager or technician in sight - or server rack.

The reality is that we can't quite do that ...yet...(OK, possibly you could if went down chrome books route...)

I would be suggesting that you take a good look at Intune. And at least set up a trial. Maybe that is way forward to manage PCs without on site servers and without having to manage AD. No; its not quite there yet. well, nowhere near there for lots of stuff, but its clearly getting there.

Edited January 18, 2019 by AlanD