Pangbourne College

Pangbourne College is a co-educational independent day and boarding school. Connect Systems started working with Pangbourne College in December 2013, we found that the network had fallen behind in terms of the technologies in use and was also vulnerable in terms of security, backups and resilience. In addition the network had clearly evolved organically and, as a result had become very overly complicated in places, which made it difficult to support and manage as well as the performance being poor in several areas.

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The first priority therefore was to ensure the system was properly secured and backed up. This was followed by a plan to improve the resilience of the network by replacing and simplifying the network infrastructure by consolidating the server environment from 15 to 2 physical servers. Once these short term objectives were achieved, the network was stable, robust and manageable.

It was imperative that the network remained up to date and fit for purpose as Pangbourne made increasing use of technology within the classroom and the administrative function of the school. Therefore a second phase of development was planned to avoid the situation where “quick fixes” are applied to accommodate a particular requirement/problem, without the consideration of a wider network development strategy or of improving the users desktop experience.

Each year the ICT roadmap is reviewed and updated for the following 3 years to ensure Connect have sight of the future development of ICT, embracing new technologies in a structured and budgeted approach. The current road map has plans to make greater use of cloud technologies whilst ensuring the local and wide area network infrastructure is resilient enough to support failures with internet connections and local inter-building links.

Neil Walne, Bursar at Pangbourne College says, “This is the second appointment in which we have been fortunate to receive support from Connect Systems and it is no surprise that the overall level of service is as high as ever.”

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