Outsourcing To Education

Corporations have been reducing costs for years by outsourcing different departments within their infrastructures. And it seems the education market is picking up on the outsourcing potential.

There is a growing trend for the outsourcing of IT departments within the smaller education markets. The aim is to provide students with as much hardware and software as schools' budgets will allow and to have well-trained instructors that teach with those technology tools--all without the sometimes-prohibitive cost of a separate IT staff.

More specifically, remote-managed services can be a great mechanism for creating or enhancing an individual IT department. Even in the smallest of schools where the football coach, the math teacher or the receptionist doubles as the entire IT staff, remote managed services have become the most sensible and affordable answer to ever-increasing budget and personnel issues.

Technology is still a new frontier in the majority of schools. The equipment range can be extreme--from several shared, outdated desktops to laptops for every student. But regardless, network and security issues are endless when it comes to protecting children from outside influences and also from themselves.

A good place to start when approaching managed services for educational-technology customers would be to install a small hardware and software probe at the customer site. The entire network is then monitored from a remote location. A customized "dashboard" can then be designed with an on-screen checklist of all the systems that the customer wants monitored.

For example, someone monitoring a school's system can see green lights next to all the areas that are functioning properly, while a red light would indicate a problem. Depending on the nature of the problem, the technician monitoring the account can fix it without ever leaving his or her terminal. If on-site service is required, a technician is dispatched to the site to make repairs. There have been times when problems occurred and were repaired before the customer even realized that there was a problem--a great advantage for schools that are short-staffed and don't have the technology resources to commit to break-fix issues.

The old way of handling repairs--calling your service provider when there's a problem and waiting for a technician to be dispatched only to find that the server just needed to be reset--is no longer the only way, which can be especially important in education. Today's remote managed-services systems are so sensitive that they can even indicate when a printer is low on ink and/or paper.

In addition to the daily monitoring, any unusual activity, heavy volume times and abnormal traffic can be analyzed through reports generated monthly, and solutions can then be implemented for a better-flowing network. Those reports will give the school a window to its network that shows current conditions and future needs. The IT staff will be able to tell if some parts are about to bring down the system, if the system needs regular maintenance and when the system needs to be expanded--in other words, they provide a bird's-eye view of the school network so better decisions can be made.

The costs involved are very affordable in light of the lost productivity that can result from downtime of a school's mission-critical applications. For a minimal monthly fee, the monitoring can be done from anywhere. Some repairs can even be done without the expense of calling in a technician. All of this results in students' having the best technology at their fingertips and, therefore, the best learning experience without the frustration of constant network downtime.

These different types of outsourced services are one way of improving the overall educational experience and providing America's youth with the best chance to succeed in today's competitive environment.

Al Marshall III ([email protected]) is the director of government and education sales at PC Universe in Boca Raton, Fla.