The education sector has had a huge upheaval over the past year and a half, with lockdowns, home schooling, remote and hybrid schooling too. Schools, colleges and universities across the globe have had to adapt to new situations and IT services have played a huge role in enabling this. As everything is starting to get back to normal, how can the education sector further benefit from Managed IT Services in London?
1. IT Security for the Education Sector in London
With ransomware on the rise in the education sector, it is increasingly important to ensure the security of your systems. This is, first and foremost, to safeguard students’ and staff’s privacy, but also to protect yourself from financial and reputational repercussions. Nutbourne can ensure that your systems are as protected as possible using many methods, including making sure software stays up to date, email filtering and DNS filtering.
Nutbourne can also backup your data offsite, so if you were to ever fall foul of a ransomware attack you wouldn’t be blocked out of accessing your data for long. Offsite data backup keeps your data secure outside of your network, so if a hacker does get access and encrypts all of your data, it can still be accessed and restored once it is safe to do so.
2. Support/maintenance
Computers crashing, forgetting passwords, intermittent Wi-Fi, trouble accessing files; the list of potential issues is endless. As we all know, IT issues can severely disrupt an important day of education. Nutbourne offer 24/7 remote IT support in London and across the UK. Should any issues arise with your IT we will always be available with our managed IT services in London.
Should you need someone on-site for an IT service, such as a problem with hardware or setting up a wired network, Nutbourne can react fast with our ad-hoc support. We can also arrange regular embedded support, anywhere from 5 days a week to just once a month, depending on how much support is required.
3. Manage Cloud
The Department for Education explain in some detail why the cloud is important. The main takeaway points are that cloud services can make education more useful and engaging, they provide better access, they can save you money and can provide better security. Migrating to the cloud can offer so many benefits, but you can’t just jump straight into it. Setting up a cloud infrastructure takes a lot of planning. Nutbourne have years of experience implementing new systems and overseeing the deployment of the cloud across the education sector.
Many educational institutions will have already started moving towards the cloud since remote schooling became prominent last year. After a cloud system is implemented, it still takes some maintenance. This could be updating cybersecurity, ensuring programs stay up to date or maintaining any equipment needed to accommodate the cloud. This is very important to ensure that the IT solutions stay fit-for-purpose and secure.
4. Save on costs
A managed IT provider in London can help to reduce the operating costs for an educational environment. One of the key cost savings is that you don’t need to have an IT team on-site all the
time. An outsourced managed service provider can still do it all. You won’t have any hiring costs. No managing costs. No training costs. It is all dealt with by trained IT experts.
This is also especially useful when it comes to scaling up your IT offering. For example, when students were all provided laptops to continue their education at home, many educational institutions had to hire more IT technicians to their IT team. The costs can all build up very quickly without a managed service provider.
5. Stay Educational
Students will always try to find a way to avoid doing work when they are sat in front of a computer. This can be hard to manage, especially if there is any remote or hybrid schooling involved. We know what the kids will do because we’ve done it ourselves! When some of us were a bit younger we’d get flash games that you could open in Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint. We’d use proxy sites to get to websites that were blocked by school computers. We’d do all sorts to try and get around any blocks the IT team had put in place and we doubt that’ll stop any time soon.
What we can do, however, is put everything in place to combat this and try and keep students on-task to maintain an educational environment. DNS filtering in particular can be tough in the modern age. You can just throw out a huge all-encompassing net, but this may lead to some useful content being blocked. It is much better to specifically manage the filtering to ensure there are as few disruptions as possible. An example of this might be a teacher needing to use YouTube or another streaming service to show educational content. Maybe there is a handy documentary on iPlayer or Netflix? It’s much better if you can provide specific access to different people or manage groups in a hierarchy.
This is also important when giving access to programs or systems to different groups of people. It could be that you need to restrict access to certain folders for GDPR reasons, or simply only allow teachers to open some programs.
Contact Us
Whether you need help migrating to the cloud, increasing your security or any other IT requirements we’re here to help!
So, if you’d like to find out more about our managed IT services in London, and how they can help in the education sector, then get in touch! Contact Nutbourne today on +44 (0) 137 7273 or by filling out one of our online enquiry forms. Alternatively, you can message us via our Live Chat option; one of our team members will get back to you as quickly as possible. However you wish to get in touch, we look forward to hearing from you!