The Bourne Education Trust had some big plans for 2019. The Trust was continuing to rapidly onboard schools and in need of addressing various aspects of their infrastructure to accommodate the growth.
Case Study: Centralising and Upgrading the Bourne Education Trust
Project Overview:
The Challenges:
- The BET schools were operating a parent and child domain model. For simplification of management they were keen to move to a hub and spoke single domain configuration.
- The Trust were outgrowing their existing firewall and filtering solutions and required a more scalable solution.
- The backup solution as a whole was in need of an upgrade due to both ageing hardware and lack of central management reporting.
- Bourne Education Trust were in a position to reconsider their data centre connectivity contract to accommodate their ambitious growth plans.
“M-Tech have gone above and beyond to ensure the brief has been achieved and nothing has been a problem for them no matter how complex the project is.”
Matt Gibson, Head of IT, Bourne Education Trust
The Projects in Brief:
Their original parent and child domain model was becoming unmanageable, with each school effectively operating independently under its own policies. M-Tech migrated the Trust to a single domain during the 2019 summer break, enabling one instance of Active Directory, Group Policy, Office 365 and System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM), dramatically decreasing management time.
The original firewall and filtering vendor combination was becoming less suitable due to the Trust’s size. After searching the market, M-Tech recommended an all-in-one filtering and firewall solution from tier one enterprise vendor, Fortinet. BET moved from a virtual to physical firewall, gaining increased security, speed, agility and efficiency. The introduction of FortiAnalyzer also enables end-to-end visibility, meeting Ofsted requirements and more.
With their backup server approaching capacity and the end of its warranty term, the BET acknowledged the need to upgrade. As well as a new, power efficient device, all schools are now managed through a powerful web-based UI from Veeam.
For various reasons, including the reducing cost of connectivity, the Trust were able to migrate their datacentre kit during October half term 2019, choosing the new location based purely on cost, redundancy and security.
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