How IT Team’s Move to Cloud Benefited Entire School Community

Picture of By Aaron Wiseman
By Aaron Wiseman
How IT Team’s Move to Cloud Benefited Entire School Community

Schools are busy places for IT teams. There are multiple systems to manage as well as providing ongoing support to teachers, students, and even parents. All with often limited resources and budget. That’s not to mention security concerns around handling sensitive data of minors.

It might seem impossible to address all of these challenges at once, but Schoolbox has helped many schools do just that by moving to cloud. Chairo Christian School being one of these schools that was looking to make better use of their time and resources.

Watch Chairo’s Head of ICT, Lyndon Calway and Information Systems Coordinator, Trevor Ciminelli, outline key benefits motivating their move to Schoolbox Cloud, including:

  • The robustness and reliability of cloud meaning fewer service disruptions
  • Enhanced security and protection of sensitive data
  • More reliable budgeting and forecasting

Security in Schoolbox Cloud

Both Lyndon and Trevor talked about security being part of the reason behind the move to cloud.

“We’ve seen an increase in the security of the service because Schoolbox undergoes multiple penetration testing, auditing, and automated patching of the system.”

Trevor Ciminelli, Information Systems Coordinator, Chairo Christian School.

But how exactly is Schoolbox Cloud fundamentally more secure than schools managing their own hosting? 

Schoolbox’s Chief Product Owner and Co-Founder, James Leckie, explains how Schoolbox is best placed to maintain the security of schools’ instances:

“Beyond being physically more secure, all cloud traffic is strictly restricted using enhanced network topology and firewalls to prevent unauthorised interception and movement of information beyond our infrastructure. We also closely monitor and act proactively against any detected threats to improve uptime and as an additional layer of security.”

Freeing up resources allowed the IT team to positively impact the entire school community

While a desire for a more reliable and robust technical solution motivated the move to cloud, Chairo’s IT team quickly realised cloud has a much greater impact.

In this video, both Lyndon and Trevor talk about the wide-ranging benefits cloud brought their entire school community, such as:

  • Less IT time spent in server rooms managing physical infrastructure
  • More time to spend with teachers and staff to better understand their needs
  • Helping teachers better utilise Schoolbox by assisting with aspects such as setting up class pages, markbooks and annotations

“I believe our purpose here at Chairo in the IT team is to help our staff and parents and students and to get alongside them. We’re not here to maintain infrastructure, we’re here to serve and that’s our role here.”

Lyndon Calway, Head of ICT, Chairo Christian School.

Why Chairo recommends moving to cloud

We asked the team at Chairo Christian School whether they’d recommend other schools make the move to Schoolbox Cloud.

The answer was a resounding yes! Lyndon and Trevor went on to add further support for the move to cloud, highlighting the ease of migrating and how seamless the implementation process was for the school community.

“We’d absolutely recommend moving to Schoolbox Cloud because it just makes sense. It […] allows you to get alongside staff and help them in their priorities and their needs rather than focusing on infrastructure and hardware.”

Lyndon Calway, Head of ICT, Chairo Christian School.

To discuss moving your Schoolbox instance to the cloud, or to find out more about Schoolbox, contact us today.