The Broadband Challenge
The Romero Catholic Academy exists to provide Catholic education for the 3-19 age range in the city of Coventry. The Trust comprises of seven primary schools and one large secondary with sixth form. The Trust’s broadband and associated services had been provided by Coventry County Council for many years.
We wanted to move all of our schools away from the current broadband and filtering supplier at the same time. We needed a mixture of 1Gbs and 100Mbs internet circuits as well as a secure firewall and a flexible web filtering service that would meet the needs of all our schools. The Trust was also seeking to use Internet4schools to facilitate the Trust’s plans for moving services to the cloud… And we were on a very tight deadline and needed to ensure minimal disruption to school life.
The Process
We tendered for a trust-wide broadband solution through Think-IT (now EverythingICT). E2BN Internet4schools won the three year contract.
Internet4schools conducted a full survey of each of our schools and then drew up a detailed project plan for the installation of services.
The survey showed that most of our schools had very little spare room for the installation of new equipment. However, with a little lateral thinking and some physical rearrangements they were able to come up with a suitable solution.
Internet4schools created a full VPN linking all the schools together, allowing secure network and device management across the whole Trust. They also created a secure link from Cardinal Wiseman to the Trust’s Google Cloud Platform servers. In addition, we also commissioned Internet4schools to provide a robust internal DNS service on dedicated hardware using virtual machine hosting. This enabled us to achieve our goal of moving one school to a server-less environment to reduce licensing and server maintenance costs.
“We appointed Internet4schools through the ThinkIT framework to replace our previous Broadband service. They managed the project with the utmost professionalism and their project management and communication skills were first class. They achieved the installation date with time to spare.”
Patrick Taggart, Academy Business Director, The Romero Catholic Academy
The Outcome
We now have a fully managed direct broadband service with Internet4schools and strongly recommend their high-quality service. The project management and implementation was completed professionally and the smooth transition was carried out as a result of a Internet4school’s detailed site and network survey. They monitor the Trust-wide network 24 x 7 and automatically alert Romero Trust key staff if any issues arise.Their technical support has been excellent.
In conclusion, I am confident that Internet4chools was the best choice for our organisation and would not hesitate to recommend them to other schools and Trusts.