matt40k

Other one is data erasing. How would you ensure that once your end the contract that they securely destroy the data. Thing is, if they give you a legal document saying the data never leaves the UK and when you leave they securely destroy the data along with any backups - they're only ever going to get it wrong once, the fines and penalties are ridiculous. Pretty sure if it's an individuals fault they can be liable for life imprisonment. Personally I think I can trust a company when the MD signs his life away - literally.

Agree to a certain point. Normally you know where the primary site is but you never know where the backup site is, you just a get legal document confirming that it is in the UK and it is signed off by an independent company or you'd have to sign a NDA all depending on the level of security we're talking. I can tell you that Azure has a DC in Ireland, not sure I can tell you the exact location. Could be wrong. I just wouldn't think you'd want to be able to find a data center with 22,000 schools MIS systems on Google Maps. Personally I'd like to know it's in England and no backups, regards of if they are encrypted or not*, leave England. Not too fussed about exact locations so long as they have a primary and secondary and they're not next door to each other (ideally something like Manchester and London). I'm sure Ireland would be fine, its just, well if its within the same country I'd assume it would be easier to deal with issues that might occur. I just assume it might get a bit sticky trying to comply with two sets of government legislation, ones bad enough. All boils down to trust. End of the day even if you get a guided tour of a data center in England, doesn't mean the data isn't forwarding to China or USA. * I'm just saying this as we know the NSA can break most encryption and surely having a database full of all the UK children with behaviour reports and critical life events kinda makes for a good platform for making predictions about the future adult population of the UK. Paranoid I know.

They shouldn't really tell you for security, but an educated guess... They list two cloud providers on their site: Bromcom Computers Plc - Partners Colocation Cloud Hosting & UK Datacentre Provider | Pulsant and Managed Hosting | Dedicated Servers & Cloud Hosting | UKFast So I would guess they have a private cloud using something like vmware.

Ahh, you're referring to the naughty @PhilNeal who's using his salesman skills to distract us whilst the Capita developers finish of SIMS 8 so we don't badge Capita with rainy clouds. Didn't your mother warning you about following other people?

I thought this topic was forked from the data migration\integration topic to discuss cloudy things? Do I have to get a mod to slap you back over to your own topic? lol Suppose the the problem with a putting a definitive definition on the term is cloud is difficult by it's very definition. I suppose its like we're trying to put a physical cloud into a box because that's what we are use to doing, we're use to products and services rather than pure services on a utility bases. I think we can all agree we have two types of cloud however, grey and white. Grey would be like putting SIMS .net in it's current form into the sky (centrally hosted) - its going to rain and very few people like the rain and even fewer like being in the rain. SIMS 8 as it's being quoted is going to be build from the ground up for the cloud, so they're white clouds and hopefully the sun will shine - maybe they'll host it Australia for something Perhaps you could do a weather forecast when it comes to your report @GREED when you're talking about their cloud type

How dare you! Calling the idea in my head a SoSaaS!! The very idea! My MIS is completely in the cloud!! If it cloud applications was truly about storage, processor , power, servers and bandwidth I would run SIMS on "Azure". Cloud is about things like scale, self-service and automation. My billing page is full of sliders and can dynamically scale up or down your MIS - I then have business logic to work out the baseline resources required the "builds" resources required. The company motto is optimization is king, failure to do so results in more resources being used and you getting leg cut off.

If a reboot doesn't work and check the log file.

I said I wouldn't charge for users or bandwidth. I didn't say I wouldn't charge based on storage! EDIT: I probably wouldn't charge per storage either, after all you want them to use the system. I'd stick with the current model of school type, school size and bolt-ons. Look at CentraStage, they charge per-device they don't charge per deployment per device.

Wouldn't charge for bandwidth, seriously not worth it. I wouldn't want to discourage people using the system. It's why you wouldn't charge a per-user fee.

How would it work for say someone like GroupCall, if they have a problem, do they have to log it via a school or once they are validated they get direct support? Would this apply to everyone? Protect your IP? Seriously? I get it for Capita SIMS, they basically give you access to their entire code base! I mean I could literally cut out any bit of code. Surely a web API would give you nothing but an API, that's the point! Look at DigitalOcean API - https://developers.digitalocean.com/ - knowing that wouldn't allow me create an alternative, taking that information would allow me to create virtual servers on any platform other then digitalocean. All the real logic is squirrelled away behind the scenes!

If someone did that, we would see a lot more developers getting involved. The work involved just to get access puts a lot of people off, which can sometimes be a good thing, but not always. The argument about security is pretty outdated nowadays - look at paypal for example, you can write interfaces that handles money without a NDA!

How easy is this get hold of? I mean can a freelance developer get access or would you need to throw some money at it first or get a sponsor? Is this more of a data dump then a possible dev system?

Seems to be a few older topic coming to life today - check out S3Unlock - Home

When your working in the cloud, your paying for every single resource, read are cheap as it'll all be in memory (with any luck), writes are expensive. So maybe I should have said cost of space + change frequency. You'd make sure you have limits on everything, even your own services - things like querying the school name shouldn't happen every 10 secs, checking for messages you would, but you wouldn't use sql tables, you'd use queues. Anyway I digress into the future. Be interested in your findings we all know about the sluhore that is SIMS but be interested to hear how the other MIS provider fair when it comes to getting at the data. I might get this framed - if only I could find that post where you were trying to tell us it was. If it's managed and in the cloud and you got access to the raw tables, you certainly wouldn't have access to drop the database. Still I know what you mean, if it's been designed correctly it'll be all container-ed, however I suspect some companies won't have. It's one of the reasons Office365\Azure was forked from Office\SQL server.

I've yet to see a free solution mate. Everything I see costs. For example... I can contact SIMS, get the business objects then import\export anything and everything. I do so, and I also write back to\from whatever system I have. Let's ignore the cost of writing the interface and any other costs I may or may not incur. Then have to pay for someone to maintain this interface, for the interface to be security check (PEN testing for example) then actual physical hw costs which alas I cannot escape. My idea, you'd just be paying the storage cost to the MIS provider. Which regards of how you look at it, you'll be paying anyway as it costs to store data. Just my idea, you're refining the design and cutting out any extras that are not needed. You also get get the benefits of 1 system also, such as one login, but you wouldn't be limited to 1 software provider. Of course this would only work if the MIS provider that did this, kept to it's core features. RE: DfE yer, I can image. The whole one warehouse idea really needs to happen and it's good to see the whole 1 domain thing coming together under gov.uk (type thing).

When you're paying £10k for installation costs, you can see why going via the LA makes sense. Bet they didn't even send you some chocolates on valentines day!

Ah you guys, you do make me laugh. I fear Phil may be bang on the money, when I read you post about Data Exchange it did remind me of ContactPoint - a brilliant idea which died a death when someone else stepped into no10 and the public head was turned to another problem. Lets hope it does not endure the same fate. Way I would do it is to have core tables, then have a third party tables that you charge third parties to use, price would depend on things like column type. This would insure the single location for all MIS data, allow third parties to have enough control but not have to worry about a million and one things like security. They would of course still have to use the same "framework" to access the data. You don't access tables anymore Phil, that's so last gen. You would use something like MVC then you could give third parties access to the "API" layer so it goes via the same logic as your UI.

@GREED - he's clearly picked them up and their migration team is having trouble

I assume you upgraded Discover as well?

Anything you do will fail when things like this happen: You'd be better off getting cats and putting cat nip in the keyboard. Actually I suspect training that cats to lock the workstation when they leave the room and to lay on the keys until they return might be easier than training some people.

OK, will do. The day Capita kills my family* and I go all Geeky Liam Neeson I shall implement SaSO and call it XYZMIS - perhaps I'll call the company 001A Better than Superman, batman and the hulk combined software development ltd? * by dropping the latest SIMS release (with patches) on floppy discs on top of them - all 4 billion of them

Hehe yer, it normally gets things sorted as well. One day I'll write a MIS system just because Capita narked me off.

It's called trusted(auto) mate. It's already present and I personally would\have\do push schools moving towards it. It makes sense to use a central single AD user rather than a separate less secure SQL login. I don't agree with requiring the user to re-authenticate. It's just wrong and makes me annoyed.

Why would Capita spend time and money making the system LESS secure in order to add a false layer of security? The security token is MORE secure than passing your AD username and password to get a security token. It goes against everything Microsoft says. Locking your workstation IS the way forward to secure your data. It is everyone who accesses the data responsibility to ensure they lock their workstation. It's not difficult, it's not long winded. It's simple. If they can't do that, they shouldn't have access to the data. Period. Stop looking for workarounds, there aren't any. If it isn't policy, push it to become policy. If you're saying staff can't lock workstations then that is and will always be your weakest point regardless what software you implement or buy. It isn't IT problem, it's SLT's.

It's not a question of the complexity of the problem. Let me just break it down. OK, so lets start at an odd starting point, the solution. If we, the community, create a tool that we release, we are going to reduce the security. We are, lets face it creating a man-in-the-middle attack, we do however have good intentions. Regardless, this is a security hole we are, on purpose introducing. Now lets look at why we're doing it. I won't say why Windows logons are better than SQL logins, they just are, don't get me wrong SQL logins have a time and a place. They are brilliant for things like background tasks like B2B. We're doing it because we believe staff should re-authenticate to access SIMS. Question is why? Why should staff have to re-enter something they've already entered - after all teachers don't have to (legally) do data entry twice, why are we adding time and complexity to the situation. Are the staff logged on as a pupil? Surely not. Are they leaving their pc logged in or letting pupils using? Surely not. If the computer has SIMS installed then you can be fairly sure they have a export of sensitive information somewhere in the user documents. All it takes is a pupil or anyone for that matter to get hold of this document for your plan to fall apart. SIMS isn't the only thing you need to secure. Teachers generally have access to pupil work - if nothing more. So, why are we doing this and not promoting locking your workstation? Seriously, login to SIMS in the morning, lock your machine when your not in front of it. Shut it down at the end of the day, how is closing SIMS every 5 mins better? Surely leaving it open is faster, even if just a few seconds then re-opening it all the time. If a pupil or someone else needs to use the machine, you switch users and SIMS will resume when they switch back. I've only ever heard 1 reason why I would even consider doing this. Going back to the whole reason why I wouldn't do it, if you have a prompt, how will you deal with login failures - ie what's to stop a student keep try until AD locks the account out, pretty sure that's going to cause more chaos as everything stops working! Any just my 2p, I know worse things that people believe is secure then a prompt window.