Schools struggling with staff working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, while their IT systems remain on site, are being offered a free lifeline from a UK IT company.
CloudHappi, which specialises in IT solutions for the education sector, is offering to migrate data and key applications to a secure, cloud-based solution, allowing head teachers and business managers speedy and remote access to their finance and management information systems, without having to go into their schools, or struggle on slow speeds at home.
“In these difficult and unprecedented times, the challenge schools face is finishing the academic year with their management information and finance systems up to date and ready for the new school year,” said Nigel Jones, Managing Director of CloudHappi.
“The issue is the majority of schools’ servers are on site, while staff are working at home during lockdown. They are finding it difficult to connect to their servers remotely and the slow speeds are making it hard or impossible to use their management information and finance systems.”
CloudHappi has teamed up with Access – one of the largest suppliers of educational Finance and HR software in the UK, which supports more than 9,000 schools – to allow key applications and data on the curriculum server to the cloud, free of charge, until the 31st August 2020. This means heads and business managers have easy, fast access to the data while they work from home.
All the information will be relocated to the same secure London Docklands data centre which is trusted and used by some of the UK’s leading brands and Access’s Cloud itself, and is all backed up to an equally impressive and secure data centre, 26 miles away. Unlike other solutions the data and applications never leave the UK
Nigel added:
“Schools using this service are seeing speed improvements of 35-40%, without having to change the computer they use or their hardworking broadband service. There is little or no downtime during the migration process, and the service is completely free for the duration of the current crisis or up to the end of August. We will then migrate data back again to the schools’ individual servers unless they decide to remain with CloudHappi as a preferred supplier.”
Graham Withers, Sales Manager, Access Education said:
“Schools are busy virtually supporting pupils while looking after vulnerable and keyworker children. Knowing that core applications are working seamlessly in the background and can be easily accessed is essential, but we know it can be difficult using on-premise solutions. While the Access Education products are cloud based, we realise that lots of the systems our customers use aren’t. SIMS is a popular tool and we are delighted to be working with CloudHappi to offer a completely free solution to give schools choice and help them at this difficult time.”
The free Access Curriculum Rescue Service applies to schools’ financial and business management systems, and does not apply to any of the teaching data held.
