Customer Success Stories in Education

Find out about our latest Education customer success stories and how we worked in partnership to enable their digital transformation

Ambitious University
turns to the Cloud to drive responsiveness to new
research, teaching and business opportunities

About Middlesex University

Middlesex University focus on academic excellence through peerless teaching, learning and research. They embrace, innovation, creative and practical thinking, investing in their students, staff and the facilities they need to make a dramatic impact on teaching and research.

Challenges

Middlesex University has selected British Cloud and Network provider Exponential-e, to enhance research opportunities and learning experiences for students and staff, while driving greater business efficiency. Exponential-e will use its UK based Data Centres to provide on demand Cloud technology, which enables a fast and flexible environment that supports the University's wide-ranging activities.

Solution

Middlesex University is a global institution and innovator that continuously seeks to utilise technology to enhance learning, teaching and working across its campuses. The use of Cloud technology and the managed services Exponential-e provides will enable the University to significantly enrich the student and staff experience.

Using the flexibility provided by the Cloud, Middlesex University will be able to easily turn on additional services, such as server provisioning, central processing units (CPU) and Network bandwidth to ensure that reliable, modern hardware is underpinning systems and activities at all time. The flexible service provides Middlesex University with the agility to scale services to cater for short periods of time when additional capacity is required, for example, in response to new multi-partner academic research projects. It also means that test and development environments can be scaled back when they are not required to achieve further cost savings.

To deliver a highly secure and resilient platform, the Cloud technology is seamlessly integrated into Exponential-e's wholly owned high capacity Network, ensuring that hosted services reside on the clean side of the firewall. Using the Network, the University will also gain greater visibility into the activity that is taking place across its infrastructure to better manage its capacity, quickly respond to changing demands and provide robust security incident and event management.

Spearheading the project is David Lozdan, Head of Public Sector for Exponential-e, who confirmed that:

Moving to the Cloud will ensure that Middlesex University can continue enriching the learning and working experience of more than 45,500 students globally and 1,700 staff by easily extending the use of new applications as they become available. Exponential-e will deliver the supporting platforms and services that will enable Middlesex University to concentrate on achieving its vision; to strengthen student achievement, bolster student satisfaction, support leadership and enhance staff performance.

David Lozdan
Head of Public Sector, Exponential-e.

Solution benefits

Freeing staff from routine infrastructure tasks so they can focus on supporting new developments and achieving business objectives.
Low risk migration to a private Cloud that does not require any IP or firewall policy changes.
Access to Cloud services that are delivered down a single piece of fibre and via a single service level agreement that includes billing, and provisioning.
Assured availability of systems in the event of a disaster through geo resilience in the Data Centre environment.
Best practice Data Centre environmental management in accordance with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centre Energy Efficiency.
Support for rapid testing and development environments for academic research.

We selected Exponential-e as it provides the right balance of cost, risk, flexibility and value for money, and has a reputation built on innovation. We are committed to building a long-term, strategic relationship with Exponential-e to assist us in the flexible provision, support and management of our infrastructure. This partnership will be a vital ingredient in the long-term success of the University and we look forward to collaborating with Exponential-e in the future to enhance the reputation and success of our University.

Paula Vickers
Director Computing & Communications Systems Service, Middlesex University.

The ideal platform for remote learning, offering seamless communication and collaboration between staff and students

About Royal Holloway, University of London

Originally two colleges that formally became part of the University of London in 1900 and merged in 1985, Royal Holloway, University of London was one of the first institutions to make higher education available to women. Today Royal Holloway continues to display world‐class research in a number of fields, well into the 21st century, and named as one of the top 25 of all UK Universities in The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2021.

Challenges

With the onset of COVID‐19, Royal Holloway re‐focused its 2020/21 IT programme with a view to achieving full online university status, delivering teaching, learning and research through multi‐channel communication and collaboration. To achieve this, the university required a scalable, cost‐effective and high‐performance solution for remote collaboration (e.g. group chat, file sharing, notebook sharing, assessment setting), supported by the right infrastructure.

One of the major limiting factors in this regard was that staff and students were in two separate tenancies, which would need to be consolidated.

In addition to the live environment, the university required a 'non‐production' environment to facilitate controlled software development, testing, and UAT, with minimal operating costs.

With a new academic year fast approaching, it was essential that all these solutions could be delivered within an eight‐week window.

Solution
Following a competitive process, Exponential‐e were awarded a contract, based on milestones, to deliver the fundamental piece of work to enable the university's infrastructure, starting with the merging of Microsoft tenancies.At the start of the project, Exponential‐e provided a dedicated team to lead design workshops with Royal Holloway's key stakeholders in order to define the migration processes, drawing on their deep knowledge of the existing infrastructure to deliver a comprehensive IT transformation proposal that fulfilled a range of strict T&Cs, budget, risk and continuity requirements.From then on, continued communication was key to achieving the desired outcomes, with regular meetings taking place to ensure targets were met, budgets were adhered to, and potential complications could be pre‐emptively resolved. To enable administrative staff to continue working effectively throughout the deployment, the university's internal teams were fully briefed on the impending changes, helping to minimise disruption and ensure end users would be properly supported.Over a 24‐day period, Exponential‐e migrated over 10,000 Office 365 user tenancies for student, alumni and test accounts - a complex operation, but one that proved the value of Exponential‐e's robust risk guarantee. The expatiated migration was achieved using 'Cloud Commander' tooling, which provided high‐speed synchronisation (up to 1TB per hour) of data between tenancies with data fidelity for a broad range of workloads. The result was a fully managed solution for all users, with a dedicated Azure AD Connect deployment and Mail, One Drive and SharePoint migrations between the existing tenancies.In parallel, Exponential‐e worked with Royal Holloway to create a futureproof active directory, with a move to a single forest, single domain model reducing complexity and administrative overheads. In addition, this sped up authentication and replication, and helped reduce the number of domain controllers required.A modern hybrid authentication / identity solution was implemented, making intelligent use of Azure Active Directory, ADFS and AD as appropriate. Multi‐factor authentication mitigated cyber security risk by requiring a second form of identification before allowing access to resources and data. At the same time, allowing users to use password hash synchronisation with seamless SSO provided them each with a single set of credentials with which to access services, providing a streamlined user experience that helped drive greater collaboration in the Cloud.An expanded deployment of Microsoft Office 365 opened the door to full online university status, allowing lectures and seminars to continue via the highly regarded Microsoft Teams platform, with the new infrastructure enabling greater utilisation of the Public Cloud, delivering the increased power,

flexibility, and cost control. In particular, a Virtual Desktop solution and a range of tools for multi‐channel communication and collaboration made it easy for students to submit essays and receive their marks remotely.

Finally, to provide a secure, flexible non‐production environment, replica domains and Office 365 environments were deployed, consisting of the 'bare bones' of the primary operating environment.

The partnership between Royal Holloway and Exponential‐e continues to evolve, with remote collaboration opening up new channels of learning, supported by an infrastructure with the power, flexibility and scalability to guarantee consistent performance - all while keeping the student experience at the centre of everything.

Solution benefits

Secure, reliable multi‐channel communication and collaboration for more than 10,000 staff, students and alumni, with streamlined access to key resources from anywhere
Clear knowledge transfer to the University's IT teams, supporting the user community throughout the project delivery
Robust cyber security and identity management, including multi‐factor authentication and SSO
Full scalability and cost control, with the ability to deploy and remove resources on an as‐ needed basis via the Public Cloud
A clean, modern and sustainable active directory, to support emerging technology in the learning space
A simplified single domain, single tenancy Office 365 federation model

Merging Microsoft tenancies was essential to underpinning our infrastructure to enable online teaching and learning for the start of a new academic term during a pandemic; implementing Windows Virtual Desktop now allows students to recreate a lab PC environment, while we have the ability to scale up or down, depending on demand.