Hosted Sims Internet Down

[Tombo]

Hi All,

 

First post so if its in the wrong place please forgive me.

 

We are looking to move to hosted sims. Have any secondaries done this already? What were the issues? What do you do if the internet goes down? Our safeguarding team are not happy about losing it if the internet goes off.

 

I know we can stay on prem but the trust want to move to the cloud.

 

Any help much appreciated.

[strawberry]

What's more likely, a service outage or an site outage?. What do the safeguarding team do when there is a powercut? or when the building can't be entered?, what do they do when they are offsite?

 

Time to look at their risk assessment and compare it.

[3s-gtech]

If the internet goes off, it should still be available via 4G/5G, so you can tether. It may be worth writing that in - no internet, safeguarding issue, use a phone.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Hi there,

 

We have just moved across to hosted SIMS or SIMS connected as they are now calling it - we are just reaching the end of the onboarding process.

I have to say the process has been far from seamless, lots of work for IT to do to migrate across, reinstalling connectors and manually provisioning user accounts for each member of staff. The whole process is so time consuming and not well thought out. All our staff are getting @connectED.sims.co.uk e-mail addresses they now need to remember in order to logon which is obviously not ideal. The first time sign in requires them to change a password and set security questions - which isn't too bad - but the fact it then takes time to sync the password change before they can actually logon to SIMS is a bit of a pain.

 

I am also disappointed that the MFA will trigger even in school - so we are now having to pick between MFA everytime someone logs in or not at all.

 

We are hoping they will work on the promising M365 integration so that our conditional access and single e-mail/password can be used. But I'm not holding my breath this will be anytime soon.

 

Only 2 weeks in and we are already having issues accessing the system - there has been a 'partial outage' for the last few days which doesn't bode well for ongoing reliability!

 

I'm glad it's no longer running on premise as it's one less thing to worry about ourselves but the actual service/solution is not great either.

 

The decision to move was taken before I joined the Trust otherwise I wouldn't have done it.

 

The actual access to SIMS if the internet went down is not a concern realistically - everyone has a 4G hotspot nowadays so it will still be accessible and probably more resiliant than what we could have provided ourselves. We are also in the middle of putting in failover internet lines in place so the likelihood of any downtime should be minimal anyway. The safeguarding issue for me is more around how often SIMS cloud has an outage as there is nothing we could do to get access. As I say first impressions of this are not as good as they should be.

 

Cheers.

[Tombo]

Really appreciate this response. We already have a backup internet connection but theres no way our teachers will use their own data to take a register it just wouldnt happen. Just wondered if you had gone as far as printing out contact details from sims and having paper registers ready just in case?

[HereIGoAgain2601]

I am not aware of them doing this at the moment. Just a few options:

 

Could you go down the route of having a 4G dongle - maybe one of the Dfe provided ones if you have any still - and put a SIM card in for worst case scenario? Even if it’s a pay as you go thing you just load with £10 on the day of any issues, or a monthly contract for unlimited data can be had from 3 business for less than £20…. If it’s really that much of a concern!

 

In our schools SLT have a work phone so worst case scenario they might have to share their 4G with the safeguarding lead.

 

Or do they not have a work safeguarding mobile - a few of our schools do for out of hours emergencies?

[FN-GM]

Really appreciate this response. We already have a backup internet connection but theres no way our teachers will use their own data to take a register it just wouldnt happen. Just wondered if you had gone as far as printing out contact details from sims and having paper registers ready just in case?

 

If you have a backup connection why would teachers use their own data and why would this be an issue in the first place please? Unless I have missed something?