CloudGeek

@PhilNeal, what is the main purpose?

MATs need a cloud based solution for their MAT-wide analytics, reporting and overall control. And this is not because I am a CloudGeek! Any MAT can tell you and more and more MATs are switchingmto cloud for this reason. @witch, with all due respect, “hosted” does not mean cloud! This is why there are tons of horror stories around “hosted SIMS” almost all switching back to on premis SIMS after a short while. It is evident in the fact that if “hosted SIMS” was good enough then why would Capita spend £millions to develop SIMS8.

Reviewing MIS for a MAT - recommendations are welcome from anyone that has done this!

Here are figures based on DfE census returns: Bring more data Yes, it’s not 9,000 MIS users, it is only 160 odd! A big difference! As a matter of interest what other MIS have you looked at @Divaldo? Are you a primary or secondary?

Well, depends source MIS and destination MIS. I hear that at least one MIS supplier mastered to migrate virtually everything! @techie17 what is the source and destination MIS?

I am yet to come across any school who managed to put SSRS into general use. Can anyone tell me if I missing something here. I’m happy to be corrected.

Yes, this is an old saying “you do not get sacked for buying IBM”. This was fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics by dominant suppliers world of 1980s - before Apple, Google and cloud. Even big MATS appear to be doing it - voting with their feet and switching over to cloud with the new boys because the big dogs didn’t / could’t get their act together!

If you simply relocated Windows App based thick client MIS - yes, you are right! Try true Cloud web App based MIS. You only need a fraction of this -10Mbits/s for a secondary is sufficient. A primary need less, 2Mbits/s.

Exactly, you are if you stick with legacy Windows thick client software. This is called re-location of Same old Software as a Service - SoSaaS. Eg Capita SIMS7. However in true cloud, to rip off all the benefits of resource sharing, MIS has to be written in web application with multi-tenancy and resource sharing in mind. Hence the same server that can barely run one school MIS will run 10s of schools. And of course no IT resources are needed for its maintenance. Hence why Capita has now started developing SIMS8 as a web application. One of the most recent and relevant write up is: https://www.vanessapittard.co.uk/blog

This is classical oversight that happens. Saving in software licences is just the start. The real saving is going serverless in school and everything around it! There are many factual case studies on this besides NPW. “Cloud first” has been the government’s mandate for the central government departments for sometime and undoubtedly will be for schools soon too!

Yes, it feels like defying the gravity and of course in full denial the age of Cloud. One of recent post that it spells out what it means switching to Cloud is a post below (copied from elsewhere) - it sums it up so nicely. I couldn’t resist sharing it here:

OK, if a week goes by without your O365 Admin App going ping with a service alert for something not working 100% right, how do think your school MIS reliability will look like?

Sounds encouraging. Did you also move school MIS and school finance to Azure? Which ones did you opt to? Any problems with performance?

Sounds too good to believe. When you search for “UK cloud outages” you get numerous outages over the past 12 months - some links are here: https://istheservicedown.co.uk/status/amazon-web-services-aws/history The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages of 2017 (So Far) - Page: 1 | CRN Are you saying in UK schools using AWS / Azure were not affected in any of these outages? Am I missing something?