Zyxel Switches and Nebula Cloud for Education

Education in many territories has gone digital. Large flexible spaces teachers can use for multiple educational activities are a feature of many modern schools and colleges. Plus, existing schools designed and built to deliver the traditional classroom teaching model have also embraced digital with students using a wide range of IT equipment across the curriculum.

This new pedagogical world relies on good wired and Wi-Fi networks that deliver consistent connections and good speeds wherever and whenever students and teachers connect. This can be a challenge for new and current schools adopting digital within existing environments. Making sure that the network is available and fast is a design & deployment challenge, plus an ongoing management challenge. The latter is often complicated as many schools and colleges are members of educational Trusts formed to manage multiple campuses under a single organisation to reduce costs and boost academic outcomes.

Zyxel switches and Nebula Cloud management are ideal solutions for education organisations looking to deliver modern, flexible networks that provide the connectivity needed while also being easy to manage. Read more about the integrated Zyxel hardware and cloud solutions on the Zyxel Nebula Cloud page, and contact Renaissance to be put in touch with experts who can discuss your needs and how to address them.

Read on to learn how Zyxel solutions helped the Inspiration Trust in eastern England modernise their network infrastructure across the 15 campuses in their multi-academy trust.

Inspiration Trust Case Study

You can read a fuller account of how Inspiration Trust modernised its network infrastructure across its 15 schools via this Zyxel case study on its blog. Here is a high-level summary:

The Challenge

When a new head of IT joined the trust in 2019, he discovered that the network across the estate was not fit for purpose.

“There were a lot of complaints about networks and access to cloud-hosted services being slow. The academies had a lot of ageing servers and storage. Each school was autonomous and had been doing its own thing. All the networks were ‘flat’. Nothing was centrally-managed, and there was no way we could make configuration changes.”

Darren Harris, Head of IT, Inspiration Trust in 2019

Darren knew the trust needed to modernise the network across the whole estate if they wanted to deliver the desired educational outcomes. To enable this modernisation, he developed and submitted a proposal to the Trust management team to get funding to modernise the entire IT infrastructure. The new structure would be based around Microsoft Cloud services for central authentication and management, plus update each campus network to use modern standardised switches and Wi-Fi solutions.

The Solution

The Trust IT team surveyed the network infrastructure solutions market and chatted with other academies in the area. Including an academy that had standardised on Zyxel network equipment and the Nebula cloud management system. Darren recalls:

“It seemed to be exactly what we needed. The Zyxel kit was comparable to the equipment we already had. The functionality was there, and it was better for us financially. I also liked that Zyxel was continually developing Nebula and adding new features. It seemed like a good fit for us.”

As a proof of concept, they installed Zyxel switches and Wi-Fi routers and adopted Nebula Cloud to manage the deployment in a single school. This proved to be a great success, and over time, the remaining 14 campuses in the trust migrated to Zyxel network hardware and Nebula Cloud. Additionally, they extended the infrastructure to a shared education centre, the Trust headquarters office, and a separate central business office. The central IT team uses Nebula Pro to monitor and manage all devices and traffic across all sites.

The hardware deployed is listed in the Zyxel case study. But each deployment will be unique, so we won’t repeat it here.

The Results

The deployment of the Zyxel solution has delivered a fit-for-purpose network that allows teachers to educate the pupils in a flexible manner. Darren commented:

“The feedback was great. Log-in times had been massively reduced, which is really important for teachers who need to get lessons underway as quickly as possible, and Internet access was much faster. From an IT point of view, we were able to manage the network from the centre. We could schedule firmware updates and change port settings. We could see and analyse the network traffic.”

Supporting and managing the academies has also been simplified and improved. Quoting Darren again:

“Being able to support the whole network from a central location has meant we’ve been able to deliver a better service to our academies. It enables us to see, on the central dashboard, anything that is out of the ordinary or when switches go offline. We are able to deliver a much more proactive service, and the academies really appreciate that.”

See the Zyxel blog for more details, and contact renaissance to chat about modernising your network infrastructure. In education or any other class of organisation.