Enhancing the quality of education through always-on access to IT resources for the entire school community

Ensuring that faculty, staff and students have equal access to the IT resources they need, and can access them whenever they're needed, is critical to providing quality K-12 education. It is also extremely challenging to do in a secure, cost-effective and efficient manner. IT departments in these educational settings face several challenges:

• Limited funding: Schools traditionally purchase new PCs when funding is earmarked for computing resources. However, because funding levels are never enough to replace all their PCs at once, especially when they are cut, they end up doing so on a staggered basis. The result is disparate environments and no parity for the user experience. This inequality means that students and teachers can't run the same versions of software and they can't leverage the newest educational and administrative applications.
• IT serviceability hassles: The disparity also presents challenges for IT management, since it is difficult for the typically small school IT departments to support so many different computers, operating systems and applications for all of the schools and grade levels. If they want to keep their environment as uniform as possible, they have opt for lowest-common denominator technologies. Scaling their IT environments up or down, as student populations change, is also extremely difficult.
• Limited computer access: Teachers, administrators and students don't have universal access to their computers. They can't use their applications from other classrooms or from home.
• Internet control concerns: Schools grapple with internet control issues. They need to make sure that students who use the internet for schoolwork are not accessing inappropriate content, and they need to guard against malware that could be introduced into the network if people download unauthorized software.

The Desktone Solution

Schools can mitigate these challenges by converting from physical to virtual desktops – essentially, centralizing desktops into virtual machines that run on data center servers. Implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has the potential to reduce desktop costs, simplify manageability, and improve security and control. But moving to a centralized virtual desktop environment is incredibly difficult. It is too costly and time-consuming for school IT staff to integrate and support all the technologies (i.e., servers, storage, network, thin clients and virtualization software) required for VDI.

Desktone enables schools to provide IT access parity to all users by quickly realizing the full potential associated with centralized virtual desktops, without having to build and deploy a VDI solution themselves. With subscription-based desktops as a service (DaaS) on the Desktone Virtual-D Platform, schools outsource VDI creation and support to service providers who already have the data center equipment, networking and real estate needed to handle VDI. School IT departments create standardized images – and customize them according to grade levels or functional requirements – and they manage those images using an intuitive interface provided by their DaaS service providers.

Schools can realize tangible, substantial benefits from the Desktone DaaS solution:

• Standard desktops: By centralizing desktops and turning PCs into generic endpoint access devices, you can deliver a uniform desktop, regardless of the age of the system it's on, while still customizing desktops for groups of users. IT staff can provide groups of users with same, latest versions of core applications and operating systems.
• Improved management: By standardizing desktops and managing them from a central location, you can much more easily support the various grade level, teacher and administration needs. And if users inadvertently change their desktops, IT can easily roll them back to a good state and quickly get the desktops up and running. In addition, annual maintenance and updates are also greatly simplified because IT is only working with a limited set of standardized images.
• Universal access: All users can access their desktops from any location, and IT doesn't have to worry about people using USB sticks that could introduce viruses. Students can keep up with their coursework using home computers and teachers can work from home and still access all of their materials.
• Easy scalability: If the student population grows, or shrinks, you can respond quickly by altering the number of desktops.
• Controlled internet access: All users and desktops can go through a controlled access point to the internet, enabling you to filter content, control software downloads and minimize the risk of viruses.
• Affordable, predictable budgeting, lower costs: Because virtual desktops are consumed on a subscription-basis, IT costs are now linear and easier to budget. Instead of desktops being a capital expenditure, and one that is subject to depreciation, they are now an operating expense. And with DaaS predicted to save 25%-35% over traditional desktop practices, you can lower overall desktop IT costs. Equally important, you are no longer so dependent on funding levels because you don't have to continually upgrade computing resources.

To learn more about how Desktone-based DaaS can help your school, contact us at 866-691-5660 or email info@desktone.com.