Dallas Hindle

According to our Annual research, movement to Cloud is one of the top 3 trends in Non-Government school IT infrastructure, with 85% of respondents citing its benefits. Worryingly, there is still a common lack of understanding, meaning very few schools have a defined strategy in place for moving to the cloud. One of the key things to know is that cloud migrations can be a gradual process, tailored to your needs. For example, many schools take a ‘toe in the water’ Hybrid Cloud approach by first moving and monitoring non-essential data externally before deciding what to do with more critical resources down the track – a smart way to safely and confidently transition.

Ok, so SharePoint 2016 is still a while away, in fact it’s currently slated for release sometime mid next year (Q2 2016), However there have been a lot of recent discussions around its features and capabilities as well heated discussions about on-premises v’s cloud. Most schools who decided to be early adopters of SharePoint 2016 will start the planning and project early in 2016 (Feb / March) or even later this year. While not a project to be tackled lightly, the benefits are huge and well worth the effort.

I'm frequently brought in to Schools to consult and work as a cloud architect and I've recently run into problems getting school staff to engage with cloud adoption projects. Thinking back, this has actually happened for quite a number of years and while it’s not as prevalent as it used to be, I've found myself trying to sell the cloud not to our customers, but to the engineers, consultants and internal IT staff who seem to think it would do them out of a job or reduce their ownership and power in their own environments.

As my job is to design tailored and strategic technology solutions for school environments, I naturally talk to schools every day. When it comes to Backups, I keep hearing ‘I just want it to work’, or ‘I don’t want to worry about it’, and more frequently now ‘I just want someone else to deal with it’. I hear your pain, that's why Backup as a Service exists! These days it seems like everyone is getting onto the Backup as a Service (or BaaS) bandwagon! With the ongoing costs managing, repairing, maintaining, replacing, supporting, troubleshooting, etc, etc of LTO tapes, tape library's, offsite storage providers, disk arrays, backup software, licensing, agents, time, warranties, manpower, power, rack space and air-conditioning... it’s all just getting a bit much and the idea of a simple Backup as a Service solution is very compelling.

Most schools in Australia are now moving beyond asking “what is cloud computing?” and on to “how can we implement cloud computing?”. Now that cloud is a popular solution, the major decisions to make become what kind of service to use and when.