pdparry

While we're waiting for the gods to decide (no rush, it's not like the second semester isn't starting early next year...) I had a chat with our senior network admin, and he's finally coming round to the idea of giving our Computing department our own Azure tenancy. The £4K we spend on the hosted VPSs might be better spent there?

Thanks all. It's gone up to our Executive Leadership Team now, via Safeguarding. Lord knows what will come out of the other end!

Hi everyone, I’m looking for advice or examples from other institutions on how you’ve managed safeguarding compliance while providing adult learners with access to cloud-hosted resources like VPSs. In our institution, we’ve been using a hosting provider to give HE students (19+ adults) individual VPS instances for building and hosting their projects (e.g., databases, C# web apps, and frontends). These VPSs have been invaluable for their learning, especially as many students study part-time and need remote access. However, a concern has been raised by our IT Services team about these VPSs being outside the college’s filtering and monitoring systems. They’re worried this breaches safeguarding policies such as Prevent and Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE). As a result, we’re at a standstill, and the students have temporarily lost access to their VPSs, which has disrupted their work. We fully understand the importance of safeguarding, but we also want to ensure our adult learners receive a quality experience and the skills they need for the workplace. Has anyone else faced a similar challenge? How have you ensured compliance while still meeting the needs of fee-paying adult learners? We’re exploring ideas like routing VPS traffic through a college-managed VPN or using more centralized solutions like Azure or AWS. If you’ve implemented a solution (technical or policy-based), I’d love to hear about it! Thanks in advance for your advice, Peter