The Ongar Academy are an Essex-based secondary school, opened in September 2015. The school operates at the heart of the community and holds the highest expectations in terms of academic achievement, personal development, attitude, behaviour, attendance and appearance.
The Ongar Academy students are challenged and supported in all their learning experiences to enable them to reach their full potential to go on to succeed in this ever-changing world.
When the school opened in 2015 they agreed a support contract with a large reseller. Over the years it was established that they simply weren’t receiving value for money and the reseller weren’t putting enough time into ongoing development. The Ongar Academy needed to find a new support partner who would have their best interests at heart and listen to their needs and wants.
Various infrastructure elements were either outdated or end of life and in urgent need of updating to keep the school as protected in all areas as possible. The physical web filter was of an older technology, ill-equipped for the BYOD of nature of modern schools. Additionally, the hypervisor was now unsupported and facing issues around security, reliability, and management.
With the UK going into lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, The Ongar Academy, along with the rest of the UK education system, needed to ensure all students could work remotely, regardless of personal circumstance.
mtech.support
Upon joining The Ongar Academy as Network Manager in 2019, Sarah Madge recognised the third party IT support the school was receiving wasn’t up to the standards she was accustomed. Sarah worked with M-Tech at her previous school and when it came time for renewal, got in touch to invite M-Tech to discuss the support contract. We proposed a managed support service on a fixed monthly fee and were successfully appointed the contract with the school, starting September 2019.
Infrastructure Upgrades
Under the supervision of the former MSP, The Ongar Academy had both an unsupported VMWare ESX Hypervisor and an on-premise only Lightspeed Rocket filtering solution. Neither were suitable for the school and M-Tech performed the upgrades with zero downtime and zero disruption to school operations.
Personal Devices for Students in Need
The school had a great interest in every child being equally able to continue learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, regardless of privilege in life. M-Tech quickly sourced and onboarded the necessary hardware along with devices enabling them to connect to 4G internet without having any reliance on a home connection.
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Download the case study to see the projects in full, plus the additional work carried out, and explore how the school are in a much stronger technological position going into the 2020 academic year.
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