T H E E D U C A T I O N C L O U D Freedom... a true Cloud based solution for education!
Contents T H E E D U C A T I O N C L O U D What is Freedom? 04 Freedom... a Cloud based solution for education! High quality ICT is essential in a 21st Century education organisation. Whether a single school, federation of academies or multi-campus college, ICT simply needs to work, first time, every time. ICT needs to be agile, powerful and deliver exceptional value for money. Freedom is the answer. Freedom Access Virtual Data Centre (vdc) Services Freedom Backup 06 08 10 2 3
What is Freedom? What is Freedom? A Brief History Many people are often confused by the term cloud computing, primarily because it has been used to describe a wide number of scenarios. The expression, coined by marketing types, simply covers any computing services that are provided by a remote network of servers, often across the internet. In recent years mobile working and access to the internet have become increasingly ubiquitous. As a result, end users quite rightly demanded greater levels of functionality and access to their data and the services they needed. This exponential increase in mobile device and internet usage led to an explosion in cloud based services. Services like Facebook, Skype and Dropbox quickly became the norm for online interaction, document storage and sharing. Since their inception these services have constantly evolved and now offer access from virtually any device, be it a smartphone, tablet or smart TV. It is clear that cloud based services have evolved and matured very quickly to meet huge consumer demand. We are now able to sign up for, and begin using, cloud offerings inside a couple of minutes. This agility of service and speed with which you can start benefitting from the Cloud is something that we at EE were keen to provide to our new and existing customers. Freedom Cloud With our own cloud solutions we aim to provide this same simplicity in adopting services designed to benefit educational establishments. Our first service offering provides customers with their own virtual data centre enabling them to run an entire school, college or academy infrastructure with none of the traditional costs or drawbacks. All associated hardware is best of breed ; maintenance and support is taken care of on your behalf and performance is guaranteed. This leaves educational staff free to do what they do best. To build upon this we also offer a fully managed backup service regardless of where your servers reside. If you have an internet connection we can back up your data efficiently and securely, further reducing your administrative ICT burden. The solution is simple and ensures that you can restore everything from individual files to entire servers, quickly and efficiently, should the need ever arise. Within our Freedom solution we also provide an education specific module. We are acutely aware that ICT will only ever be as good as the ways in which it is used. To this end our Freedom Access Learning Platform is focused on ensuring that students and staff have all necessary resources to hand, whether they are based in school or accessing via the internet remotely. Freedom Access aggregates several services into an easy to use and engaging portal that students and staff will want to come back to time and time again. All of these services allow your establishment to make the best use of its capital expenditure whilst maintaining a firm grip on ongoing revenue costs. The services are all entirely flexible and costed on a usage basis each month. As such they are able to scale with your needs and you never end up paying for more than you require. What's next for Freedom Cloud We are constantly working to improve and enhance our services. We see Freedom Access as a collaborative platform and our development team is constantly working to improve it. In fact, much of this has been customer driven with new functionality being implemented and made available to all existing and new customers with no increase to their costs. 4 5
Freedom Access Freedom Access Freedom Access provides the best of several years of our Learning Platform development work direct to you and your users. Built upon a fully resilient hardware and software infrastructure, Freedom Access provides a fully customisable platform with which to engage your learners and staff, pulling together content and information from multiple sources into a single exciting interface. When integrated with the other services your school, college or academy has subscribed to, the Freedom Access platform really can become the central hub of learning through ICT for you. Unified Portal Freedom Access provides its users with a single portal that pulls in functionality and content from several sources into a single easy to digest platform. Mobile Device Aware Freedom Access has been designed from the ground up to fully support mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. The custom developed interface uses large tiles and includes a custom thumbwheel for easy navigation on touch screen devices. Integration The Freedom Access platform has been designed with education in mind. We have worked with several of the most common vendors of third party systems within education, developing functionality that easily integrates cashless catering, library and print management systems within the platform. Personalisation The Freedom Access homepage is entirely configurable to the end user's preferences. Systems that they use most often can be pinned to their own personal homepage, simply and easily. This ensures that the most pertinent information is quickly available to each user. MIS Integration Our custom development of the platform allows critical information from the MIS system to be extracted. It can then be displayed to users dependent on their role within the school or college. Anytime, Anywhere Access The platform provides users with the ability to access their data, systems and content at any time of day from anywhere. Constant Evolution At European Electronique we understand the need for IT to continuously evolve. As a result we constantly develop our platform with functionality enhancements. Because Freedom Access is a service, those enhancements are made available to you as soon as they are released without charge. In fact we welcome requests for enhancements as they will potentially benefit all of our customers. Enterprise Platform The entire Freedom Access infrastructure is underpinned by enterprise level hardware, virtualisation technologies and application functionality all designed to ensure system uptime. We can provide a service that is backed by strict SLAs guaranteeing service availability. Flexible Deployment Options Freedom Access can be deployed both as Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) allowing you to choose to use our service or develop your own, benefiting from our hardware investment. Office 365 and Google Apps The great functionality provided by these free to education services can be fully integrated within Freedom Access. Students and staff can benefit from collaborative services, online storage and document editing right from the portal. Auto Population for Easy Adoption Using our custom developed OptiMIS solution we are able to automatically populate Freedom Access directly from your chosen MIS solution. This functionality accelerates getting your users into the system and allows them to quickly make the most of the platform. 6 7
Virtual Data Centre (vdc) Services Virtual Data Centre (vdc) Services Our Freedom Cloud is an innovative approach to infrastructure provision based upon bestof-breed networking, server and virtualisation technologies. It facilitates an easy adoption of cloud based services, providing all the benefits of enterprise level datacentres at a fraction of the cost. Using Freedom Cloud, we can provide all of the infrastructure a new or existing school might require, from servers and storage through to networking and firewalls all within the core offering and for a single, easy to manage cost. The virtual data centre provided to your school will be fully tailored to your specific requirements, ensuring you only ever pay for the resources you use. Our provision also allows for flexible and hybrid deployments. This encompasses establishments that might have a strict requirement for local services and those that may be considering Cloud adoption to make better use of funding during infrastructure refresh. Using our design and implementation services will ensure that a secure and resilient hybrid cloud can be created for you, with maximum integration and minimal fuss, all whilst maintaining excellent user experience. Most importantly our Freedom infrastructure enables us to provide a unified service. Our partnerships with connectivity providers like Panoptics ensure a single point of contact for all ICT inside and outside your school, college or academy. This enables us to provide extremely competitive pricing whilst ensuring that your infrastructure is in safe hands. The adoption of Freedom provides the basis to integrate both on premise and other cloud provided services quickly and easily, as shown in the diagram opposite. Our experience and expertise will ensure that all of the chosen services can be provided to the school, college or academy in a unified and seamless manner, with the provision of a coherent and rewarding user experience. Benefits of Freedom Deployment Reduce time taken to get online using your own templates or select from our build catalogue. Start small and grow as necessarynever pay for more than you need. Dynamically increase resources on a server by server basis. All backed by up to 40Gbps networking in the data centre. Management and Security 24/7 monitoring and alerts on the health of the underlying hardware and your servers. Isolation of your servers from everything else on the Freedom Cloud. Secure datacentre location with full physical security. Encrypted connections for administration and management. Benefits of Freedom Cloud Lower infrastructure costs. Scales with your school. Future proof your investment protected. Full resilience across the entire platform. 24/7 technical support Best-of-breed technology provides optimal performance. Full integration with other Freedom products. 8 9
Freedom Backup Freedom Backup This cloud based service offers an easy and efficient way to ensure the protection of your data. With more learning taking place using ICT, the protection of student and staff data is increasingly important. Using our Freedom Backup service you can ensure that this critical user and MIS system data is always protected and ready for quick and easy restore. The service is fully managed by our own UK based staff taking away any administrative headache and freeing time for your ICT technicians to better support you and your users. Less Can Be More The Freedom Backup solution includes a significant amount of technology designed to reduce backup windows and bandwidth usage whilst still offering full data protection. After a single full backup is taken all subsequent backups simply pick up the changes since the previous backup. These delta backups are then compiled ready to provide a complete full restore should it ever be necessary. This all results in less data being transmitted between school site and our datacentre. Data compression and de-duplication are also used throughout to minimise backup traffic. Free Up Your Time By removing the need to run, monitor and troubleshoot backups the time saved can be spent supporting your end users in teaching and learning activities. Hybrid Capability Within education it is often necessary for large files to be created and changed on a regular basis. Video editing and other specialist curricula can dictate the use of local backup to conserve bandwidth. Our solution provides local backup capability where backup data can then be de-duplicated, compressed and sent to the cloud for long term retention and offsite protection. Easy Reporting One of the main reasons to use a cloud based backup service is to free up onsite technical staff to support your teaching and learning, however you still want to know your data is adequately protected. The Freedom Backup solution will provide you with daily reports and an easy to use interface where backups can be tracked and monitored. Simple Restore Functionality Restoring data is made very easy through the Freedom Backup platform. Users can simply log in to the management console and restore data themselves or contact us to restore the data for them. Application Aware The Freedom Backup solution provides the ability to protect and restore Microsoft Exchange and SQL server environments. As such you can rest assured that the critical MIS, finance and email data at your school, academy or college is fully recoverable. Jump Start and Rapid Recovery In order to get the service up and running quickly a local backup can be carried out which is then physically taken to our datacentre and copied up to the enterprise level hardware. All backups across the internet will then be smaller delta backups, reducing the time taken and bandwidth used. Should the worst, happen the process can be carried out in reverse with data physically taken from the datacentre to site for rapid and full restore. Multi-Platform Support Freedom backup supports a wide range of operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux. In addition both vsphere and Hyper-V are fully supported allowing for full VM backup and restore capability. 10 11
ABOUT US European Electronique s primary business focus is to leverage all aspects of ICT to improve the life chances of every learner in the UK. Regarded as a leader in the provision of innovative ICT solutions to the education sector, we are best known as a specialist in integrated solutions for new Academies and Free Schools. Our success has seen year on year growth despite challenging economic conditions, with current turnover approaching 60 million. T H E E D U C A T I O N C L O U D We have gained enormous experience through engagement with teachers and leadership teams of hundreds of new academies, one school path finders, colleges and free schools from the original and current government programmes. We have used this experience to develop our portfolio of products and professional services, focused upon educational attainment, to offer all our clients a complete range of services under a single ICT partner. INNOVATIVE, TRANSFORMATIONAL SOLUTIONS Our solutions are designed and implemented by industry professionals who are dedicated to the education sector. Our approach is to embed these highly experienced professionals within our client s team and to accept their educational goals as our own. Key to this work is ensuring that our solutions enable the realisation of individual client s educational visions and ensures the maximum impact on improving standards thereby maximising their investment. Freedom... a true Cloud based solution for education! European Electronique Ltd Forward House Oakfields Industrial Estate Eynsham Oxford OX29 4TT T: 01865 88 3300 E: enquries@euroele.com