IT that runs on the school calendar.
Managed IT, cybersecurity and infrastructure for independent, Catholic and Islamic schools across Sydney and NSW. Specified properly, delivered in the window that suits the school, and documented so the next person can pick it up.
A school is not a small business with more users.
A term is a fixed runway. An outage during exams is not the same as an outage on a Tuesday. And the weeks in January are worth more than the other forty-eight put together.
Density, not headcount
Nine hundred devices arriving in the same three minutes at recess is a different engineering problem to nine hundred users spread across a business park. Wireless in a school is sized for concurrency and roaming, not for a floor plan.
A calendar you cannot move
Cut-overs happen in the holidays or they do not happen. That means scoping in Term 2 for work that lands in July, and hardware on site before the last student leaves.
Data that carries obligations
Student records, wellbeing information, staff files and family contact details sit under the Australian Privacy Principles, and increasingly under a cyber insurance questionnaire as well. Boards are asking harder questions than they were three years ago.
One ICT manager, or none
Most schools we work with have a small internal team, sometimes a single person, carrying everything from a jammed printer to a firewall refresh. We are there for the layer that person should not have to own alone.
Every layer between the server room and the classroom.
Network and wireless
Switching, cabling coordination, wireless designed for classroom density, guest and BYOD segregation, and network access control so the right device gets the right level of access.
Read more about Network and wirelessSecurity
Firewalls, endpoint detection and response, identity and conditional access, email filtering, vulnerability scanning and cyber threat intelligence, aligned to the Essential Eight.
Read more about SecurityServers, storage and virtualisation
Refresh planning, capacity sizing against real workload data, and migrations run in a holiday window with a rollback plan written before we start.
Read more about Servers, storage and virtualisationBackup and disaster recovery
Tested restores, not just green ticks. Recovery objectives agreed with the school and documented, so the answer to how long it takes to get a system back is a number rather than a shrug.
Read more about Backup and disaster recoveryMicrosoft 365 and cloud
Tenant configuration and hardening, Intune and device management, staff and student licensing, SharePoint and Teams, cloud-to-cloud backup, and Azure where it earns its place.
Read more about Microsoft 365 and cloudProcurement
Hardware and licensing sourced through our vendor accreditations and specified against the workload rather than a catalogue. We quote comparable options side by side so the school can see what it is choosing between.
Read more about ProcurementWhat that looks like in practice
- Scoping happens before pricing. A senior engineer looks at what is actually there, so no proposal is built from a phone call.
- Change lands in the holidays, with the go or no-go decision made before the last week of term.
- You get the directors. Direct access to the people who scoped the work, not an account manager relaying to an offshore desk.
- As-built documentation, asset registers and runbooks are handed over at the end of every project.
- Australian engineers during business hours, with after-hours P1 response for schools on a support agreement.
- Australian infrastructure and Australian cloud regions, so data sovereignty questions have a straight answer.
A project, a renewal, or a question nobody can answer yet.
Most engagements begin with one of those three. Any of them is a reasonable place to start. A free consultation gets a senior engineer across your environment, and you get a written view of where things stand whether or not you go further.
The Essential Eight for independent schools
A practical starting point when the board asks where the school sits.
Read more The Essential Eight for independent schoolsPlanning school IT projects backwards from the calendar
Why the term dates, not the budget cycle, set the delivery plan.
Read more Planning school IT projects backwards from the calendarChanging IT providers
What an MSP transition actually involves, and what has to transfer.
Read more Changing IT providersThe things schools ask us first.
Do you replace our internal ICT team?
No. Most of the schools we work with have internal ICT staff, and we work alongside them. We take the infrastructure, security and project layer so the internal team can stay close to staff and students. Where a school has no internal team, we can carry the lot.
We already have an IT provider. How hard is it to change?
Less painful than most schools expect, provided the handover is planned rather than rushed. Documentation, credentials, licensing ownership and vendor agreements all need to transfer properly, and a good transition runs to a schedule rather than a switch date.
Can you help with the Essential Eight?
Yes. We assess against the eight mitigation strategies, show you where the school currently sits, and build a realistic path to the maturity level you need. Most schools are further along on some strategies than they think, and further behind on others.
Is our data stored in Australia?
Yes. We use Australian infrastructure and Australian cloud regions, and we are compliant with the Australian Privacy Principles. It is usually the first question in a procurement pack and the answer is straightforward.
Are we too small for you?
Our minimum is five users, which is deliberately lower than the twenty to fifty most providers require. A small school office and a large secondary campus are both workable.
When does the work actually happen?
Scoping and procurement run during term. Physical work and cut-overs are scheduled into the school holidays, or after hours where the change is small enough to be reversible. Hardware is on site before the last student leaves.
Tell us what is coming up next term.
A senior engineer will map where things stand today and what it takes to get where you are going. No lock-in, no obligation.
