& Storage in the Cloud Case Study

Transcription

1 & Storage in the Cloud Case Study

2 Colleges and Projects Accrington & Rossendale East Riding College Exeter College Grimsby Institute Hartlepool College Highbury College Northampton North East Worcestershire College Reaseheath College Xaverian College Office 365 roll out - Lancashire Colleges Shared Services Partnership Office 365 Cloud Student Storage and Collaboration in the Cloud GIFHE Zone in the Cloud Cloud Computing Project Phase 2 Office 365 Student Migration Project Using Software as service to deliver cloud based and office tools Office 365 Project Migration to Office 365 from a Novell delivered application and mail system Summary This set of projects is concerned with a number of ways of moving College and storage to the Cloud. This has been achieved largely by the use of Microsoft 365 or Google Mail. One of these projects achieved this through sharing and storage cloud services within a group of Colleges. A number of these projects also used Microsoft 365 and Google Apps to make applications available through the Cloud. Another project is progressively integrating the college s IT infrastructure with that of a Cloud Provider. Key Drivers Limitations on server capacity. Limitations of buildings. 24/7 demand for storage. Demand for access on mobile devices. Need to integrate information systems. Flexible capacity. of contact after students leave the College. Intended Beneficiaries Students & Staff 2

3 Impact to date and anticipated The impact of these projects includes continuity of access to and storage by students and staff on a wide range of College, home and mobile devices and the ability to allocate appropriate levels of data storage to students and staff. Another feature is the enabling of document sharing and single sign on, which will facilitate collaborative working. All of this should contribute to increased student and staff productivity. Accrington and Rossendale College: A collaborative procurement project to migrate from traditional, low capacity, on-premise and storage provision to the Office 365 cloud delivered platform. Office 365 gives our learners the resources that we couldn t have provided economically prior to the implementation more storage capacity in the cloud and the ability to access their data from anywhere and on mobile devices. Losing their work on pen drives that go astray is a thing of the past! Supplier engagement experiences Exeter College: Faced with ever-increasing demand for storage and access to productivity applications and data, anytime, anyplace, this project aims to ensure students' expectations are met without the need to add further hardware in-house. The College datacentres are at capacity and it is hoped that this project will mark the beginning of a process of moving a significant proportion of the College's systems to cloud - hosted environments. In turn we anticipate improved business efficiency and user experience. Grimsby Institute: Student is now swapped to GOOGLE mail. This opens up other GOOGLE apps for students to use - such as GOOGLE docs etc. This swap will allow easier students access to on their own devices. The adoption of Google Mail and Google Apps has gone really well. We are currently averaging around 350 unique users of the system daily. To facilitate our cloud desktop, a new system was set up for our learners. Google Mail also allows access to Google Apps giving our learners access to feature-rich collaboration tools all hosted in the cloud. At present we have 16,000 accounts on Google, averaging around 1300 logons per day. North East Worcestershire College Cloud based storage. This will allow us to remove our exchange server and reduce the amount of space and time taken up with backups, as Google Vault will essentially replace our backup procedure. This will see an estimated reduction of 600GB and reduce the nightly backup time by around 2 hours. Cloud based document storage has allowed staff to upload, create and share documents with 5GB storage. The real advantages here have been seen in the ability to create and edit documents on mobile devices and the ability to share documents with others, including students, allowing for paperless assignment feedback and submission, inside and out of our VLE cloud based storage. Single sign on this has allowed staff and students access to over 40 resources, not just the cloud based storage and . This has reduced the amount of training required to access resources and removed some of the pressure of LRC staff in helping users locate usernames and passwords for the various tools. 3

4 Xaverian College Mail is now managed by a third party with guaranteed 99.9% up time, something that the College would never have been able to guarantee. Together with additional functionality, including calendars and shared contacts, the College is now in a position to share information internally in a much more efficient manner. The ease with which the Office 365 system can be added to users own devices (including tablets and other mobile devices) has born immediate fruit with College managers of all levels receiving information on the go and not having to log on to a work station to identify issues to be dealt with. Supplier engagement experiences Common themes which have emerged here are difficulties caused by the timing of the discontinuing of Microsoft s Live@edu and implementation challenges with Microsoft 365. Another challenge was upgrading band width through JANET where required. Colleges stressed that time should be allowed for evaluation of alternative approaches. Hartlepool College: A number of suppliers have demonstrated both Google apps and Microsoft 365 to members of the Executive and ILT policy committee and a month long evaluations of Google and 365 has taken place. A sample group of students provided their feedback on their preferences. Quotes have been received and evaluated. A sample group of students were interviewed as to their preference. The vast majority preferred Microsoft 365 to Google. The evaluation period has taken longer than originally intended, this was due to the number of suppliers involved and problems with meetings being delayed/postponed due to staff/suppliers availability etc.. Northampton College: We followed the procedures recommended by Microsoft to set up Live@Edu and some test accounts. These worked well. They were reasonably simple to access and had 10GB of mail and 25GB of document storage and access to Microsoft Office Apps on line. Microsoft then decided to discontinue Live@Edu and replace it with Office365 instead. We were advised by Microsoft to discontinue the existing setup and start again. The changeover to Office 365 involved the creation of 5 new authentication servers, a great deal of technical time and much interaction with Microsoft, which was not an easy process. Microsoft then also changed the storage quotas to 500MB of SharePoint storage instead of 25GB of normal on-line storage. North East Worcestershire College: Using the JISC Community of practice helped find a supplier based on recommendations and real life project work completed. Technical and Security Challenges East Riding College: The functionality of Office365 does not offer a straightforward interface to Web Apps and online storage. Until Office365 can provide this, we are promoting the use of Microsoft SkyDrive through our LRC s. Firewall and web filter configurations have been modified to support this. Highbury College; It is believed that all data cannot be put into the cloud due to it being seen as single point of failure, size of data and security risk. It is also believed that organisation data centres could put up costs and lead to vendor lock in. Xaverian College: The complexities of an individual institution s systems cannot be fully catered for in third party software documentation. Assumptions that it should work on key operational systems does not mitigate risk. The College wasted valuable summer holiday time rectifying a possibly avoidable situation of system failure. 4

5 Change Management experience Common themes which have emerged here are difficulties caused by the timing of the discontinuing of Microsoft s Change management experiences included the challenge of maintaining access for learners whilst their accounts are migrated to the Cloud and the need for user training. Accrington and Rossendale College: There was an issue in going live during term time. The migration process can take a number of days, and during this time students will have no access. This, however, took place over the half-term holiday period to minimise the impact. Due to the complexities and logistics of operating as a consortium of four individual colleges, some of our ability to react quickly to the creation and agreement of tender documents is sacrificed. In future projects, we would aim to consolidate this process into a much tighter time frame, leaving more time after supplier appointment to effectively plan and deliver the solution. North East Worcestershire College: Change management was done through a series of pilot groups focusing on different features of the product. These pilot groups information was then shared with the whole organisation to allow all to see the pros and cons of each tool. This was also then linked to training and support materials on these. Issues around staff change - staff were initially wary of using a cloud based service to host files and were worried about issues of access - could they get them all the time etc.? Issues around training - initially we did Google apps training as one thing but realised quickly that we had to break down each individual element and work on supporting staff on each element of the app family. Reaseheath College: The change management aspects were mostly transparent to the end user. The main change process was carried out of a term break which allowed us to issue training and guides for use. Return on Investment Whilst some colleges regard it as too early to identify savings, a significant proportion have identified specific and general savings in items such as exchange servers, associated licences and considerable technical staff support time. Accrington and Rossendale College: Across 4 Colleges 52,000 over 4 years. Xaverian College: Before the advent of this cloud computing project, the College dedicated a significant amount of technical support time to the daily management of its system. The Mercury server and its Pegasus end user client was the domain of a single member of the network support team with specialist knowledge. As the College has grown year on year with ever constrained finances, the use of a full time member of the team was becoming untenable. Moving to Office 365 has meant that management of is now distributed across the network team with the vast majority of technical management handled by a third party. This has resulted in much needed support available in managing the in house systems still present. 5

6 Lessons Learned Highbury College: Close monitoring and communication of external providers is essential for the success of the project. North East Worcestershire College: We would have worked on understanding the training needs required to fully grasp the tool sets and features available. Full roll out to everyone was ambitious but as more people make use of the tools, more are moving towards the platform. Reaseheath College: We would have carried it out as soon as the academic year finished. 6

7 7

8 With thanks to all project partners who contributed to the development of this case study and consultant Chris West Association of Colleges Stedham Place, London WC1A 1HU Tel: Fax: Website: