ICT Services

ICT Services provided to schools were based on a model that no longer is fit for purpose, NGFL set up to support schools at the time was cutting edge tecnology, but that was ten years ago and technology has progressed and the needs of our customers has changed. Due to new innovation and the changing complexity of ICT management, the ICT support ser... vices to schools subscribed to in the past no longer represents best practice. They were considered by schools and the Local Authority alike to be restrictive and there was a need to change to meet school needs. Due to the restrictive nature of the previous support offerings, the new BSF Managed Service and a change in Microsoft licensing from cost per device to per pupil, ICT have realigned our service offerings. ICT have met many challenges in turning our existing School ICT Service into a BSF ICT Managed Service, we have changed our approach and have needed to start again, begining with the back end infrastructure that supports the schools network. Aged Infrastructure Due to numerous network performance issues at the begininng of the school year, it was necessary to review our back end infrastructure in Nodal Rooms in order to fulfull our obligation to deliver an ICT/BSF Managed Service. Back end Infrastucture in Nodal Rooms was approxiametley 10 years old, therefore we needed to review the hardware and put in place a hardware refresh programme, this included the very foundations of our network infrastucture the Domain Controllers, Print Servers and Local Software Servers. Also our existing Wireless Infrastructure that was initially installed for schools a number of years ago although adequate at the time is no longer fit for purpose. The number of access points and expendential growth in the numer of devices accessing the wireless network has caused authentication bottlencecks. This has not been dependant on the type of wireless network installed but due to the number of Radius (authentication) servers. We have reviewed the wireless network design in order to ...Read More