The German International School Sydney

Friendlyware have been supporting GISS since 1995 and have been a key partner in suporting the schools growth and evolution.

In order to provide teachers, staff and students improved access to teaching material and communication tools, improved scalability and cost savings, GISS on premise data was migrated to the cloud.

 

Founded in 1989, the German International School Sydney (GISS), offers a complete multi-lingual school education from Preschool to Year 12 to over 360 student in Terrey Hills.

Client Spotlight

The Problem

As the school expanded, the existing on-premise server-based solution became increasingly slow and difficult to manage, struggling to support the growing scale and complexity.

The Challenge

The school asked for support in making the teaching material more easily accessible between teachers, students and administrators and to help improve their communication and collaboration tools to allow them to work better remotely. They also wanted to optimize their current server assets and look for long term cost savings.

The Solution

We conducted an initial research phase to review the school’s current infrastructure, ways of working and communication methods. This was done together with the Principal, Administrator and Heads of School Departments.

The decision was made to integrate the on-premise server with the Microsoft Office 365 Platform. This resulted in a hybrid server solution which balanced the benefits of both cloud servers and the on-premise server.

The migration process involved a re-think of the existing shared folder structure which had evolved over 20 years. The system had accumulated many legacy issues and data access complexity during the school’s growth phase. The new folder structure needed to take into consideration different access levels between, staff, teachers, departments, classes. The new structure was designed with the working group before selected data was migrated into the cloud.

Moving to the cloud meant significantly more internet traffic, so we also reviewed the Internet Service Provider switching to a faster, more reliable service using Telstra infrastructure which resulted in a 55% cost saving.

The cloud migration process took two months to complete from the start of the planning phase to completion of data migration.

After the migration teachers enjoyed the added flexibility in preparing teaching materials and being able to work remotely.
The School reduced its maintenance and infrastructure costs as it was able to run fewer on-site servers.

Real Businesses, Real Challenges, Real IT Solutions

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