Cloud Services
Cloud computing is becoming increasingly relevant in our day to day lives. By having a cloud strategy your students and teachers are able to use technology in a school environment the same way they might use it outside of school, giving teachers improved flexibility in the way they can teach. The cloud also supports educators planning and marking away from school premises by providing them with secure access to teaching resources and online materials from any location.
Multi Academy Trusts can use the cloud to realise benefits including cost savings across the trust. Your MAT can use the cloud to consolidate individual school systems, servers and infrastructure into one unified network, improving collaboration and reducing the amount of IT your MAT requires to support its pupils and teachers.
Why Are Schools Embracing The Cloud?
1. Cloud-services are cost effective
Significant savings are achieved by consolidating various elements of your schools ICT infrastructure to the cloud. Energy costs are greatly reduced. Hardware costs and ongoing support costs are also mitigated.
2. Cloud services are eco-friendly
Schools can significantly reduce their carbon footprint by consolidating their internal server infrastructure to the cloud.
3. Cloud services are secure
Cloud services remove the need for localised storage, reducing the risk of data loss and data leakage. In addition, your ICT staff will be liberated from the responsibility of ongoing local security patching.
4. An always-updated licencing model
Applications will be automatically updated to the latest software version from the cloud. With an ‘always-updated’ licencing model, ongoing software licencing upgrade costs are replaced with a cost-effective subscription-based model.
5. High service availability
Most cloud-based services offer a 99.9% service uptime guarantee.
6. Access to free Microsoft and Google productivity suites
Qualifying schools are entitled to Microsoft Office 365 for Education and Google Apps for Education productivity suites free of charge.
7. Cloud services are flexible and fully scalable
Learning can easily be extended beyond the classroom thanks to the nature of the clouds anytime anywhere web-based access model. Cloud services can be accessed from a comprehensive range of hardware devices, including desktop PCs, Macs, tablet devices and thin clients.
8. Protect student and staff data
A comprehensive range of cloud-based data backup solutions are available to schools, in addition to data backup options that are available when using online application and productivity suites.
