JSPC were brought in at Downsbrook to replace the technician previously employed by the school. At the start of the contract six months ago, the school had at least six physical servers, each running difference versions of Windows. There were also compatibility issues with the hardware, which came from a mixture of manufacturers and had a range of form factors and ages. Two servers were laptops, one of which had a failed hard drive and no available backup. The school had no offsite backup whatsoever, and this issue was compounded by the fact that the local tape backups were unreliable. This meant that the school was at a high risk of complete loss of all data in the event of a disaster.
The school was running RM’s CC4, an expensive and overly-complex system designed for administering school networks – this system made it difficult for staff to troubleshoot the most basic of IT issues in the classroom and required multiple calls to JSPC for remote support. The school’s remote access system was also a proprietary RM product which only provided the most basic of access to files on the network. Anti-virus software was also unmanaged, with several PCs throughout the school unprotected and putting the network at significant risk.
Early into the contract, over the May Half Term, JSPC rebuilt the school network from the ground up. Having set up backups as a priority when starting to work with the school and preparing server hardware in advance, the project was completed in four days. The aging fleet of servers was replaced with a single modern server capable of providing all of the previous network's functions.