St Catherine’s School Sydney delivered new tech to students just three weeks before school started using SureDeploy

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“We now rely on SureDeploy to automatically test and package all our devices, drivers and applications, so every roll out and upgrade runs smoothly. SureDeploy has considerably reduced everyday administration time and given us the ability to focus on other areas of the school’s technology infrastructure”

      Rathika Suresh,
      Director of ICT, St Catherine's School
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Case study overview

Read about how we helped rollout new tech to St Catherine's students just three weeks before school started, modernising the endpoint management.

Challenge

  • Maintaining the school’s existing bring-your-own-device policy at a consistently high standard was becoming complex and time-consuming for the internal ICT team.
  • Emerging technologies presented the opportunity to alleviate this pressure and free the ICT team to focus on high-value initiatives.
  • The existing partner was unable to build out an Intune solution in the time required.

Solution

  • Implementation of SureDeploy to roll-out and manage a fleet of 220 new Microsoft Surface devices in just two months.

Result

  • Significant time savings and improved ease of deployment for the ICT team.
  • Meeting an aggressive deployment schedule over the school holidays
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St Catherine's School

Client Overview

 

St Catherine’s School Sydney is Australia’s oldest Anglican school for girls, founded in 1856.

Today, the school welcomes day students from Kindergarten to Year 12 and boarding students from Year 7 to Year 12. Technology plays an important role in enabling girls to achieve their potential at school and beyond.
"While St Catherine’s has always provided a very high quality technology experience to students, the benefit of SureDeploy has really been from an IT administration and security perspective. The automation and rapid deployment of applications, policies, updates and patches has been invaluable."
StCatherines-School-logo-1
Brendan El-Hadi
ICT Services Manager

Detailed Case study

Challenge

 

Time for a major hardware refresh

 

A future-focused school, St Catherine’s prides itself on providing a high quality technology experience for its students. Having reliable, quality devices is essential in supporting students’ learning while at school, as well as equipping them with the skills they need to thrive in their future careers.

St Catherine’s approach to device leasing and management had grown organically, in line with the needs of students and staff. However, maintaining the optimal operation and security of 1,500+ devices had become overwhelming for the school’s internal ICT team. New devices would take around six to eight week to provision and deploy, and IT resources were tied up with ongoing maintenance.

The school sought Microsoft’s advice on the most suitable technology and partner to assist in this scenario, and were referred to CNS's SureDeploy.
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The Solution

 

In keeping with the school’s focus on innovation, St Catherine’s ICT team wanted to roll-out brand new devices for their Year 5 and Year 7 students, deciding to wait until the Microsoft Surface Pro 8 Laptop series became available in Australia.

Unfortunately, this occurred just a few weeks before the start of the school year. With SureDeploy, however, the team were able to make it happen, rolling-out the new devices to the entire cohort, in three weeks that would have been impossible without SureDeploy’s automation of Intune.

A new device management strategy was established, structured around the needs of different year groups. From Kindergarten to Year 4, students use Surface devices which remain on campus . When a student reaches Year 5, they are provided with a brand new Surface Laptop which they can take home and treat as their own. This device is refreshed when the student reaches Year 7. Students in Years 10-12 are permitted to bring their own laptops.

The Results

 

Moving to SureDepoy delivered several significant benefits for St Catherine’s.

Devices can now be deployed faster and without excessive burden on the ICT team, who are now free to focus on other areas of the school’s technology.

Security patches can be scheduled, deployed to a pilot group and then pushed to the wider student groups. The school’s ICT team can rest easy knowing security vulnerabilities are constantly monitored and resolved. This applies not only to Windows devices, but for all of the school’s applications.

SureDeploy keeps every single application in the school’s Intune environment and endpoints up to date, by automatically pushing the latest applications into Intune and to our devices for us – ensuring all student devices are always running the latest version of every learning applications.

If a problem with a device does occur, it can simply be replaced by a new device, without the student losing any of their cloud-based files or settings.

This has reduced the workload on St Catherine’s help desk significantly, and allowed the team to focus on more strategic improvement initiatives.

Image credits:
Images sourced from St Catherine's School website and YouTube channel.
"The St Catherine’s IT team were already doing an incredible job of maintaining 1,500+ devices – though the scale at which they were doing it was not sustainable. SureDeploy has provided essential automation"
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