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With competition to attract students ever intensifying, universities need to transform their offerings to students in order to differentiate themselves and drive alternative income streams. It is vital that universities evolve with student expectations to create this compelling ‘student experience’.

As the demand for student services becomes increasingly more diverse and complex, students want access to their information and applications instantly, wherever they are. This challenges universities to maintain skilled resources to not only manage but continuously improve their infrastructure. Simultaneously, universities also need to transform their operations to consistently deliver maximum value at a reduced cost.

Hosted Desktop as a Service

SCC’s hosted Desktop as a Service (DaaS) can help universities achieve their aspirations to provide a student-centric environment to offer flexible access to students’ data and applications, whenever and wherever that need it, whilst protecting the integrity of the institution’s infrastructure.

Our DaaS solution enables users to securely access their desktop, applications and data from any location, on any device whenever they need to. Hosted on SCC’s multi-tenant, secure and resilient cloud platform, DaaS allows universities to provision users rapidly and to offer students flexible device options. This allows students to balance their personal and educational lives, studying at a time to suit them, from their preferred device.

Our Hosted DaaS is delivered as a managed service with SCC maintaining and managing the desktop profiles and operating system, to ensure it is always up to date with vendor releases and refresh schedules. Universities benefit from 24/7 support, guaranteed service levels and predictable monthly costs. By eliminating the traditional capital expenditure associated with upgrades and refreshes, and replacing it with a simple consumption based model, universities can drive cost savings and significantly lower the total cost of ownership of their estate.

DaaS supports any Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives that universities are looking to deploy and allows students the freedom to use their own technology to access university applications. With diversity being a key driver in education, this environment also provides improved accessibility for fullt ime, part time, distance and disabled learners allowing them to access university applications, using whatever devices they need. This can lead to collaboration on a potentially international scale, with students being able to easily communicate and interact with academic peers anywhere, at any time.

The service is charged on a per user basis, providing the ability to scale up and down as institutional requirements change, ensuring they only pay for current active users. This is particularly valuable to cater for differing and multiple course commencement dates with the DaaS solution able to flexibly reflect this need. Increased clarity on what devices are actively being used across their campuses at any point in time, better enables universities to optimise their device estate and therefore drive cost savings by device and application rationalisation.

SCC’s Desktop as a service ensures the ongoing security, compliance and availability of educational institutions’ desktop services.

Purchasing from SCC

SCC partners with Lenovo, under the London Universities’ Purchasing Consortium National Desktop and Notebook Agreement (NDNA) to supply client devices which support hosted and traditional desktop solutions, including complementary services. We support all three lots of this framework agreement to support the entire lifecycle of client computing for our educational customers, from supply and configuration to support and finally disposal in our award winning recycling and remarketing facility.

Alternatively, if a University tenders under their own terms or a different framework, SCC can offer devices at a competitive price from all Tier 1 vendors including HPI. Utilising our strong partnerships with all Tier 1 vendors, we can provide universities access to fast and reliable client infrastructure which meets the increasing demands of students and the strategic transformation goals of higher education.

Benefits

SCC’s hosted DaaS offers a wealth of benefits to our university customers, including:

Universities can scale as required and only pay for what they need
Quicker and easier access to student applications
Streamlined deployment of appropriate applications
Consistent desktop and office software across all devices
Releasing IT resources to higher value activities
Cost savings by moving to a revenue model charged by consumption
Simplifying and enabling client ‘Bring Your Own Device’ initiatives.

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