Knowledge is power, but schools, school boards, and other educational organizations can't rely on brainpower alone to create functional and productive learning environments.

Challenge
Educational organizations and data centers are hardly strangers. For decades, schools and administrative bodies have operated on-site data facilities, relying on networked computers for tasks such as website management, e-mail, admissions and registration systems, HR and payroll operations, and benefits administration. Today, while these tasks remain vitally important, the data center is often located at a convenient and secure off-site facility that offers a full range of support services. Besides cutting costs, moving data centers off-site has also allowed educational organizations to dedicate more physical space to core academic activities.

Like most other enterprises, educational organizations are concerned about data center cost, performance, and reliability. Uptime has become an increasingly pressing concern over the past several years, since service disruptions as brief as only a few minutes can severely impact classroom-oriented activities based on IP video, hosted applications, and other technologies. Security is another major worry, as educational organizations strive to protect students' personal information and academic records, as well as test documents and a variety of business-oriented data.

Educational organizations require a full range of data center resources, including application servers, storage systems and power and environmental and technical support services. Over the next few years, it seems likely that the education sector will increasingly rely on fast and reliable network connections to deliver multimedia instructional content directly to schools. Broadband networks also will allow students and educators to participate in online interactive classrooms with counterparts worldwide. Administrators, meanwhile, will have the ability to launch cost-saving Internet-based examination programs, allowing them to test millions of students simultaneously with greatly reduced overhead.

The current global economic crisis is placing public and private school budgets under tremendous pressure. Meanwhile, many businesses serving the education market also are feeling the impact of tough economic times. All of these organizations are turning to virtualization and server consolidation to get better value out of their IT investments.

Solution
Data centers allow schools, colleges, universities, school boards, state education departments, and various other types of education-related organizations to develop and support an ever-growing number of instructional and administrative services. IO provides affordable outsourced data center services, including colocation, private cloud computing, network services and remote support. And with IO's 100% uptime Service Level Agreement, educational institutions can feel confident that their IT systems will be highly-available and always-on.

Learn more on how IO can help.