We are a private apprenticeship provider based in the UK with 41 academies including head office. Each academy range from 1 – 3 classrooms – with the exception of 2x 4 classroom academies. Classrooms have an average of 25 desktops in each. Our HO has around 40 staff.
The board have asked us to look into moving all existing infrastructure to the cloud. As a result of this, we have been looking at combining Windows 10 with Office 365, Intune (EMS) and Azure Active Directory. The plan will also include some application deployments in Azure (Incl. our business-critical LMS/Portfolio application Maytas/E-Track).
At the moment, each academy has its own isolated network with an on-site DC which runs DNS and DHCP.
There is no site-to-site link at all.
The DC runs active directory for the classroom PC’s on that site ONLY – we have no central active directory.
ALL staff laptops/desktops across all academies + head office are either on a workgroup, or connected to Azure AD – head office is a mess as we have no control (i.e. AD DS)
An MPLS solution has been at the top of the plan for months now, but after countless hours of reading, it appears SD-WAN is the way to go…especially as most of our infrastructure will be delivered as-a-service (Azure). However, we are still confused as to why we wouldn’t just simply set up a site-to-site VPN (Using Cisco Meraki or equivalent) instead of the SD-WAN solution?
Please also bear in mind that we already have Office 365 E3 licenses which all staff currently use for email, sharepoint and Skype for Business. We are also looking to deploy Skype for Business as our PBX solution in the near future.
What comms+WAN solution do you guys think best fits our design?
