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Our biggest cost savings so far have been: Replace promethean boards with cheaper Samsung or BENQ interactive LED TV's Replace MSOffice with Google Apps for education (spend the savings on EES on a dual leased line) Stop buying expensive MSOffice desktops and using chromeboxes or chromebooks. Everything must be saved to cloud, stops the ever increasing requirement for server storage Fewer, centralised printers. No more desk printers, MFD's only Introduce a BYOD scheme and have parents contribute to the cost of you computers - no more IT suites except for specialist ones. We've done all of that and we are still spending around £60-70 per pupil (the average according to the DfE is £80pp in the local area - sorry I can't remember where to look that up!). Unfortunately you don't really have the budget to do much more than firefight.

Can we be clear that my primary objective is failover for if the SAN, HBA or blade chassis packs up or there is a critical incident eg a fire and we move buildings. I'm talking about cloud failover and we'll only look at using this as replacement when is has proven reliability and is cost effective. That is why I put it forward as a suggestion to spending £££ on. I'm very surprised nobody else on this forum is advocating this. This was the first thing I did ! - I've now got eight servers that are built entirely from scripts. Once this was done it is trivial to put them in the cloud, or anywhere else. I agree that Windows is why it is difficult for people to change but there are ways around this if you look: for example MSSQL runs well in a (linux) Docker and can presumable be setup for distributed and load balanced systems. AWS offer a in cloud domain controller which is linux based, or you could roll your own using SAMBA4. Papercut is proven to work nicely on linux as do DNS and DHCP so these are really good choices to have a cloud based resilient backup.

Containerisation is the way *everything* is going. VM's are so 2005.

A redundant leased line costs us about £6000 per year, it's about the same as Microsoft EES would cost us if we used it. Even an offsite redundant DHCP server doesn't seem to mind the latency which is about 10ms. We are using file stream which only streams the files as you need them, it's kind of a cached online storage and doesn't suffer from the problems that you experienced. We found GCP a lot cheaper. Also consider that you might not need to run your redundant servers 24/7. perhaps only 8hrs a day. And you don't need to run huge servers that do nothing 99% of the time. If you containerise your applications and run them from docker you will find the costs much more agreeable. You are probably trying to compare a multi-core high RAM server running windows, but building apps (DNS, DHCP, Samba) as discrete containers is the way forwards.

I'd buy cheaper and less reliable servers in school and then buy redundant servers inside AWS or Google Compute engine. We are in a middle of this project now and get redundancy if our server room packs up or any individual server fails it will failover to Google servers. As the price goes down of the cloud servers (it decreases year on year) we will eventually bin the local ones.

This is probably the most accurate post I have ever read. (Someone who has undergone two MIS changes and planning the third)

Some of ours have been there over 15 years ! Out of interest, where did you get the 6 year figure and why do you suppose this is so long ?

Thank You

Sorry for such a basic question, but I can't see where I delete old employee records from SIMS after staff have left.

Good wireless is only as good as the latest ratified standard.

S/MIME on Google Suite: https://blog.google/topics/education/tools-every-school-g-suite-education-updates/

loads of those services are opensource anyway so presumably you'd just 'brew install nginx' etc.

You can manage these with tools like Chef, Puppet or Ansible

Google have an extensive GDPR satement. https://www.google.com/cloud/security/gdpr/ How do people get the ldea that Google are going to not comply and therefore be unable to operate in Europe ? I mean what planet are they living on ?

A lot is already charged for. We are already paying for the Google Cloud Platform and management of Chromebook devices. It looks like will just be adding new features to their premium services.

is this still the case ?

^ that's pretty shocking. I guess part of their strategy is to make you still reliant on an Office local install so making sure everything is 100% reliable in the cloud would almost be a negative thing for Microsoft. The Google up-times look a lot better in comparison, but of course it's more problematic when it does go wrong. https://www.google.co.uk/appsstatus#hl=en-GB&v=status

wow. Sometimes it's really intriguing how other schools work ! I've just been asking around here and apparently we've allowed (expected!) students from all ages to email teachers for the last 15 years ! so for me it seems really strange that a school doesn't allow it.

I suspect it depends on how it's designed. Azure, AWS and GCE are all capable of running docker containers, so it is conceivable that a well designed MIS could just failover to another cloud provider. Our services are designed to failover from our server room to a cloud service. We don't failover to another cloud provider because of the cost is too high but I don't see why a company like Capita wouldn't design their MIS to do that, but I do see why 0365 might choose not to.

The instructions don't seem to work: [color=#707070][font=segoe-ui_normal]Copy[/font][/color] [color=green]# Register the Microsoft RedHat repository[/color] curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/prod.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/microsoft.repo [color=green]# Install PowerShell[/color] sudo yum install -y powershell [color=green]# Start PowerShell[/color] pwsh No Presto metadata available for packages-microsoft-com-prodpowershell-6.0.0_rc.2-1.rhel.7 FAILED https://packages.microsoft.com/rhel/7/prod/powershell-6.0.0_rc.2-1.rhel.7.x86_64.rpm: [Errno 14] HTTPS Error 404 - Not Found I don't think microsoft have got to grips with package management yet.

All our files are in Google (team) Drive, so SLT control the permissions of who has access. Like I say, I can override with some command line trickery it but can't stop the audit. I just use the regular (super) admin account.

No, i've not found a way to do it. I think only Google can delete things from the audit or disable it.

I don't have access to all our files. I can give myself access, but I don't have access by default. If I give access there is an audit log that cannot be overwritten by me, or any other administrator. It seems entirely reasonable to do this and I think that those who say it cannot be complied with could have a look at some systems that do allow this.

At least these aren't soldered directly onto the logic board like the newer macs.

I've only used GCE and not AWS or Azure. Whenever there has been a problem the service just failed over so I've not known anything about those problems. Just for the record; I didn't state that anything could based is completely bullet proof - but it is just more reliable than running certain services locally because I don't have to worry about things like power failure, some idiot site staff unplugging something, the building burning down etc.