Case Study – Upper Wharfedale Primary Federation Cloud Migration Project by Cirrus
Client Background:
- UWPF: The Upper Wharfedale Primary Federation is made up of four small, rural schools; Burnsall CE (VA) Primary School, Cracoe & Rylstone CE (VC) Primary School, Grassington CE (VC) Primary and Kettlewell Primary School. Each school has its own identity, but they operate together as one organisation, with one Governing Body and Leadership Team.
Project Overview:
- On-premise to cloud migration: Each school managed their users, devices and data independently with individual on-premise servers. They were looking to move to a cloud based model to enable all schools to be virtually managed and centralise data in order for staff to collaborate across the federation.
The Challenge:
- As the on premise servers were fast approaching end of life and the headteacher wanted a solution in place ready for the new academic year, we had a tight timescale to achieve everything required. We also had to ensure the day to day running of each school was unaffected with continuity of data access.
Solutions Provided by NYES:
Project officers from various teams were involved in scoping and providing the full solution required by the federation which included:
- Full project scoping and consultation working with the headteacher to establish the needs of each school and the federation
- Deploying Intune cloud-based endpoint management solution
- 100+ staff and student devices configured
- Unified Smoothwall internet filtering to cover all 4 schools
- Cloud filter solution to provide URL filtering off site
- Mobile device and application management
- Migrated all users to a single 365 tenant
- Federation Teams structure created for collaboration across all 4 schools
- On site school server data migrated into Teams cloud environment
- On site staff server data migrated into OneDrive cloud environment
- Federation email domain created and assigned to all users
- Staff Teams training session
Client Testimonial:
- Claire Greenwood, Executive Co-Headteacher: Expressed high satisfaction with the outcome of the project, highlighting the thorough scoping and consultation, smooth transition for each school and overall contentment with the final outcome.
Testimonial:
"The team supported from initial audit to implementation and were always at the end of the phone when questions arose. The project ran to time, and any issues that occurred during the project were dealt with in a timely and effective manner. The team were supportive and knowledgeable and have moved all our schools from aging servers where collaboration across schools was challenging to a single cloud-based solution allowing us to work together more efficiently."
- Claire Greenwood, Federation Executive Co-Headteacher