A recent “network engineer” apprentice success story involved a trust containing numerous schools and sites. As an organisation they had been acquiring additional sites that needed services, without much opportunity to integrate and standardise them. The situation had become managing a series of completely different schools in terms of builds, services, cloud tenancies and approaches. One of these sites may have been in a woodland which had its own fun challenges.
We began by understanding what they had – about 15 completely different sites and setups. This developed into understanding what leadership priorities were – their aims and objectives – basically a standardised approach across the sites, and more importantly a way to duplicate this across future sites without many additional changes in a cost-effective way.
We started by taking their most complex site – it involved CCTV, voice, payment systems, printers and the on-premises storage of quite sensitive data. We looked at data flows from the cafeteria areas, the isolated video capture and temporary storage, ensuring that students couldn’t “accidentally” connect to the staff machines and a couple of wireless networks (guest, controlled guests, and internal). This resulted in a series of vlans, wireless setups and other general concepts – we also explored setting up a hub-and-spoke WAN topology to the main site but opted for migrating and centralising cloud services instead.
This then resulted in a series of designs that are currently under review – this then enabled us to explore change management approaches and how we’d actually do this once they get approved – looking at config changes, rollout (and rollback) plans and when this could actually happen with minimal downtime.
This has now become a wider project where our apprentice is now leading the transformation of cloud systems, the redesign of the topologies of numerous sites and the project planning of making it happen. Roll on the summer!
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