The Education Industry & The Benefits of Managed IT Services

Few professionals know the value of a dollar better than educators and education administrators. Frequently tasked to achieve broad goals with limited financial resources, educational institutions are rapidly discovering how managed IT service providers and consultants can make reaching those goals easier.

Lets look at just a few ways that an experienced managed IT services company can be your educational institution’s best ally.

Boost Collaborative Learning

Information technology has changed the way today’s students learn. Collaborative learning, for example, challenges students to work together in groups to solve a problem or examine an issue. Interactive video displays allow multiple students or groups to work on the same problem simultaneously, and videoconferencing allows direct, face-to-face communication between students who may be physically miles apart.

A managed IT services provider can assist in all phases of collaborative learning technology deployment—from system setup and monitoring to training of educators—freeing your on-site IT staff to focus on the day-to-day challenges of running your institution.

Migrate Educational Data from Paper to the Cloud

Our educational system was founded on ink-on-paper resources. Moving vast numbers of hard documents (such as curriculum plans, study materials, handouts, quizzes, tests, and student records) to a digital format can seem daunting. A managed IT consultant can help organize and digitize these materials, and secure who has access to them, without tying up your on-site staff.

Secure Sensitive Data

Cybersecurity presents a challenge, not only for business, but for education as well. Maintaining the security of test and quiz information, for example, helps ensure honest test participation and securing sensitive communication between students and teachers (or between teachers and administrators) is essential to the operation of any educational institution.

A managed IT services consultant can help your institution select, purchase, install, and maintain the cybersecurity protocols you need, without breaking your budget.

Store Shared Resources

Digital resources that are designed to be shared by multiple users can quickly eat up server space. By migrating these resources to remote servers or to the cloud, a managed IT services consultant can lighten the burden on your institution’s on-site servers, reduce server downtime, and monitor user access to each resource.

Manage Open Online Educational Courses

The surging popularity of MOOCs (massive open online courses) presents the unique challenge of combining large numbers of users accessing vast amounts of information 24/7. In such an environment, network performance problems or downtimes can fall anywhere between the annoying and the disastrous.

A managed IT services consultant can monitor your network 24/7/365 and troubleshoot any problems before they become serious.

MAINTAIN DIGITAL LIBRARIES

Digital libraries represent another vast educational data storehouse. By migrating these data reservoirs to the cloud, an IT services consultant can help lighten the load of on-site servers and safeguard stored resources from data loss.

Handle Data Loss Prevention and Recovery

In any IT environment, there is one nightmare scenario everyone dreads: a catastrophic data breach or loss. The time to address such problems is before they arise. By establishing loss prevention protocols and a “disaster plan,” a managed IT services consultant can help prepare you for any contingency.

And if disaster does strike, an experienced and skilled consultant can implement data recovery protocols to minimize the impact of any loss or service interruption.

Prevent Unwanted Access With The Proper Managed IT Services

Web-based education has shown amazing results, but remains vulnerable to unwanted browser searches. By implementing DNS (domain name search) filtering your institution can better restrict student access to inappropriate online sites. An experienced consultant can help you select and install the most cost-effective DNS technologies in your institution.

At Iconic Technologies, we understand the value of today’s IT systems to contemporary education. Our skilled consultants are prepared to help: