Cloud computing has touched many industries over the past two decades, but one sector that isn’t frequently seen as a recipient of the benefits of cloud technology is the education sector. However, there are lots of ways in which cloud services can be leveraged by educators to make their jobs easier and/or more effective. We discussed this with an IT support company London based educational organisations have partnered with in the past.They are a trusted professional outsourced IT Support London provider who help companies enhance and utilise their Microsoft Cloud in the best possible ways.
TechQuarters, who have been extolling the virtues of the Cloud for well over a decade now, told us a number of reasons why educators ought to consider adopting cloud services.
Virtual Classrooms
Using cloud-based services, such as Slack, or Microsoft Teams, educators can host virtual classrooms. There are a lot of benefits to this application of cloud computing. For starters, opting for virtual classrooms can lower an educational organisation’s infrastructure costs quite considerably, because they won’t need physical spaces (or at the very least, they will need fewer physical spaces) to hold classes.
Another way in which opting for virtual classrooms makes things easier for educators is during the onboarding process for teachers. Furthermore, teachers have a bit more flexibility with developing courses and providing learning materials.
Cost Reductions
Leveraging cloud services can provide opportunities to cut costs, which means both the educator and their students can save money. Students won’t need to spend lots of money on books or software – instead, they can use e-books (which are cheaper), or even get free digital reading material created by their teachers; likewise, the cloud makes provisioning software a cheaper and easier process on the behalf of the education provider.
The cloud helps businesses of all kind lower infrastructure costs by eliminating the need for servers on premises. Hosting one’s network and infrastructure in the cloud also makes various processes – such as enrolment – quicker and cheaper.
Scalability
Following on from the concept of educators migrating their network and infrastructure to the cloud, we have the concept of educators being able to scale their infrastructure, and their services, up and down to match the growing (or fluctuating) numbers of learners they have enrolled. If there happens to be a significant influx of people paying for their services one month, an education provider that leverages the cloud will find it much easier to scale their resources and ensure every user has what they need.
Ease of Access / Reach
If education providers can host their classes, learning materials, and other resources in the cloud, it means they can provide their services to more people, more easily. Ease of access has always been a major attraction point for businesses when it comes to cloud computing. With the cloud facilitating seamless delivery of content and resources, there are very few barriers for learners. Likewise, the ease of accessibility also means that educators can achieve a greater reach with their services – more people will be able to enrol onto their courses.
Data Security
Security is an important consideration for every single business in the world, nowadays. Education provider in particular need to ensure their security is highly robust and reliable, because they will be hosting sensitive information that their learners have entrusted to them. Most cloud services (for instance, Microsoft 365 and Azure) have excellent security and governance capabilities. Equally, the cloud makes it easier for organisations to protect their own data. For instance, educators can adopt solutions like IKEv2 to ensure that all data leaving their network is automatically encrypted – for example, content being streamed to remote learners.
Reduction in Hardware
One of the main objectives of business adopting the cloud is eliminating as much of their on-premise hardware is possible. There are a lot of benefits to this. For instance, TechQuarters told us that providing IT support for education providers is much easier when their entire infrastructure is hosted in the cloud – it even means that they can automate some aspects of their support (such network monitoring, and threat detection). For educational organisations, it makes managing their infrastructure themselves both easier and cheaper.