Universities are challenged to deliver an exceptional student experience within tight budgetary controls. By migrating data and applications to the cloud, with the help of an IT expert, these challenges can be met.
The higher education sector is beginning to adopt hybrid cloud for the same reasons as commercial businesses; more agility, scalability, enhanced levels of support and unlimited resources, just to name a few.
Cloud technology is growing and evolving rapidly, opening up new possibilities for the education sector. However, the journey to cloud is not straightforward and requires a helping hand.
With the right IT partner, education can benefit from; strong IT support, broad application needs being met, highly protected student data, unparalleled agility and huge cost savings
Higher education – It’s time to start the journey to a cloud amalgam.
Introducing Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud is an integrated blend of on-premise private cloud and third-party public cloud services, with orchestration between the two platforms. By allowing workloads to move between private and public clouds as computing needs and costs change, hybrid cloud gives the education sector a greater flexibility and more data deployment options.
The solution is a ‘best of all possible worlds’ platform, delivering all of the benefits of cloud computing such as flexibility, scalability and cost efficiencies with the lowest possible risk of data exposure.
Transforming education’s estate
Without the need to purchase and install infrastructure, school systems can deploy applications in a matter of days or weeks and add capacity in minutes.
An operating expenditure (OPEX) allows for greater forward planning and transparency on IT expenditure. By moving beyond the public cloud into a new era of hybrid IT that combines public cloud, private cloud, and traditional IT, education can improve the way it runs its estate.
A partnership that makes IT work
SCC’s Cloud Services can address challenges such as migrating legacy systems, a shortage of technical skills and limitations in network infrastructure. By offering a portfolio of services, which are tailorable to specific requirements, from assessment and sandboxing, to full migration and managed services, SCC can make the journey to cloud a smooth one.
SCC also owns and manages three Tier 3 data centres in the UK. We operate our own private cloud environment, Cloud+ and a secure, government accredited cloud environment, Sentinel.
Universal Cloud Services
Our model, Universal Cloud Services (UCS), allows Education customers to consume cloud services on a pay-as-you-go model, selecting services from a variety of cloud providers to best suit workload requirements.
SCC’s UCS is available to universities as a managed service, allowing them to consume cloud from multiple providers with visibility through one management platform and receive one consolidated monthly bill. The platform can provide detailed billing insights, data usage reports and analytics to enable the university to track consumption and rationalise the infrastructure, minimising waste storage and bandwidth.
Some services cannot be moved to the public cloud due to regulatory and legal restrictions (e.g. classified research), so opting for a hybrid cloud solution allows these workloads to be managed either on-premise or stored in SCC’s secure private cloud, Sentinel.
Here’s how to go Hybrid
Hybrid cloud allows universities to take advantage of unlimited resources based on demand-driven usage and move workloads to their optimum environment for performance. SCC can do all of the hard work for you. Find out how, here.
Kat Cooke is Senior Content Writer at SCC. She was previously Senior Journalist at the Aesthetics journal, and has worked for Sky News, providing live coverage of the last two General Elections and the EU Referendum. Kat has a 2:1 degree in Journalism from City University London.