The Sabden Multi Academy Trust

By building an efficient, secure and flexible network with unbeatable internet power, we’ve given them the key to achieving their vision – now and in the future.

Challenges

At the point of amalgamation, none of the six sites were linked and they had varying levels of connectivity. It was a frustrating situation; to operate efficiently and achieve best practice, the schools desperately needed to share resources. And this kind of specialist education uses technology to great advantage, in every area of learning, unfortunately, some woefully poor internet speeds were jeopardising the quality of the pupils’ experience. Security was another area of concern. The management of firewalls by another outsourced provider was unsatisfactory to say the least – with changes taking weeks to implement. The Trust’s in-house IT team needed help fast.

Solution

Beaming had previously delivered 100Mbps fibre connectivity to one of the Trust’s schools. Seeing the instant benefits of this upgrade, they asked us to continue the good work and overhaul the connectivity of the entire Sabden estate. We did this by developing a secure network built on a PWAN core, linking each of the six sites using Ethernet fibre connections. And, because the network was designed as a ‘fibre ring’, its built-in resilience supports the Trust’s Business Resumption Planning. We’ve also taken over the firewall management, offering a fully responsive change control service. Further resilience is ensured by employing Layer 3 switches to control routing, providing automatic failover for the network.

Results

The new network enabled the different schools to operate as an efficiently functioning collective, helping management, staff and pupils alike. It meets their specific security requirements and allows staff unprecedented working flexibility. It’s also been built with the future in mind; any schools joining the Trust at a later date, can be swiftly linked to the PWAN core and tap into the Trust’s shared resources.

The ramped-up internet speeds have had a massive impact on the quality of learning resources, with the pupils reaping the benefit. But, above all, the Trust has found a partner that understands their needs. We listen, we deliver and, if there’s a problem, we always keep them in the loop.