Canterbury College x TASS Cloud Hosting Case Study

The Challenge

Round-values

We spoke with Afzal Shariff, Director of I.T. Services, and Chris Hughson, Lead Platform Manager, about their main challenges with on-premise infrastructure to run their core systems.

The school experienced key challenges like:

Bottlenecks and scalability issues during peak periods
High operational costs for infrastructure, backups, patching, and upgrades
Risk of downtime during severe weather and COVID snap lockdowns
Security concerns and rising cyber threats

Being a TASS school, this move was an opportunity to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, and support that the TASS team offered. The process began in early 2021 and included:

Collaborative planning: Using TASS playbooks and scoping documents
Testing and mirroring: Bandwidth allocation and configuration checks
Fast cutover: Completed in under a week, with additional monitoring into early 2022

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"One of the problems we faced was the high cost of server infrastructure, plus scalability issues during peak times."

Afzal ShariffDirector of I.T. Services - Canterbury College

"Hosting in the cloud gives us confidence. It’s reliable, and the TASS team is knowledgeable and responsive. That collaboration is critical for us."

Afzal ShariffDirector of I.T. Services - Canterbury College

"When schools think cloud is expensive, they often forget to include the real costs of running on-prem.”

Chris HughsonLead Platform Manager - Canterbury College

"The main challenge we faced with managing on-premise infrastructure was making sure that high availability, resilience, and redundancy were maintained, having the ability in the event that there was a problem."

Chris HughsonLead Platform Manager - Canterbury College

“Moving TASS to the cloud freed us from day-to-day database management and gave us peace of mind around high availability.”

Chris HughsonLead Platform Manager - Canterbury College