Education


operate around IT, and these changes will be based on historic decisions made by individual organisations as well as at regional level by the councils responsible for them. Some schools will run the latest and greatest technology, whereas others will rely on older tech assets; some schools will operate their own IT staff to manage assets, while others will be supported by the local council remotely. Te smaller the school or college, the more likely it is to rely on outside support. Conversely, universities and larger colleges are more likely to run their own IT infrastructure and having dedicated support teams. To understand this market and be successful, you first have to


look at your own services and what kinds of customer you are best set up to support. Are you looking for larger customers or smaller ones? Can you support a wide mix of technology and IT assets, or are you more of a specialist in your approach? Are you looking for customers that are local to you, or are you happy to pitch for business regionally or nationally? Tis will help you understand which kinds of education providers


you can support, and which ones are not a good long-term fit for your business. Trying to support small schools that are not profitable accounts over time will be an exercise in frustration on both sides, while those that are supported by their council IT staff will involve selling to the relevant local government organisation. Discovering how your potential target customers operate in practice can help you avoid wasted time and effort on marketing and procurement to those that either can’t won’t ever be in a position to buy from you. Alongside this, you will have to get registered with Cyber


Essentials. Tis is the UK Government scheme for cyber security best practice, and it can help your prospects put their approach to security in order. Certification can be essential for bidding for public sector work in deals linked to local government, not for profit and central government contracts. Getting accredited yourself can also make it easier to supply security services to public sector organisations, as they use it as a proof point for your skills and competence around this area.


Consolidation and cost – the route in for education Te biggest opportunity with customers in this sector will be around cost. While every school IT professional would love to have the budgets to manage and secure their IT in the way they see fit, the challenge is that they are constantly asked to do more with less. At the same time, IT estates within schools, colleges and other education providers are rarely uniform and homogenous - these organisations have to sweat their IT assets for as long as possible. So, any approach you take will have to support all those assets as standard. Alongside this, the security tools and products in place may have


been implemented as one-off projects or standalone solutions to particular problems. Te staff involved want to deliver the security levels that they see at other organisations but are rarely in a position where they can adopt a ‘blank sheet of paper’ approach to planning and executing this strategy. Instead, they are constantly involved in fire-fighting and eking out their budgets on the tools they have. To solve this, you can approach potential customers around how


to consolidate their security approach. Te goal here is to help the customer reduce their spend on individual tools or wasted resources through using a smaller number of security solutions. As part of


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this, you will also have to support any migration from those multiple tools to a single platform, complete with a cut-over period to ensure that the consolidation is a success. Security consolidation can free up budgets for IT projects,


delivering a return on investment to the education provider. Tis financial argument can help you cut through where approaches based solely on protection for pupil data are not enough to move away from the status quo. Tis is where understanding the team involved in delivering support is essential. For example, in a project with Falkirk Council, we supported a IT team of three people who were responsible for delivering IT security to more than 100 remote locations, including 55 primary schools and nine secondary schools. By cutting the number of tools involved in delivering security, the IT security team was able to reduce their spending around security by 40 percent. At the same time, they were able to improve how they managed risk for those schools through automated blocking of attacks and deployment of patches.


IT management and going further Part of this approach involves looking at wider issues than just security. When it comes to risk, the majority of issues are related to out-of-date soſtware that requires updates or end of life soſtware that is no longer supported. For many IT teams, just knowing how many assets are in place, and what their status is, is a huge burden that they can’t keep up with given all the other priorities that they have to support. So, alongside security consolidation, look out for other IT management processes that you can automate as part of the same project. Patch management is an essential part of managing your IT estate,


but it can be overwhelming given all the updates that are published every month. Regular events like Microsoſt and Adobe’s Patch Tuesday can help IT teams at your customers plan ahead, but they can rapidly fall behind due to the sheer volume of patches that are getting published. Prioritising those issues that are most important or represent the most risk is essential to help your customers be more effective. Automation around these tasks can free up staff time and help


with your financial arguments for projects. Looking at time spent on patching today can show how well the team is doing, and find ways to improve performance around updates. Most IT staff will manage updates remotely, rather than having to visit each machine as they did in the past, but this can still be a time-consuming and therefore costly process. Using automation around lower value or less risky updates can help your customers stay up to date with their patching but not cost as much to deliver. Tis extra time can then be put into higher value activities that make a difference to the organisations themselves, whether this is looking into end-of-life soſtware or delivering new services that make teachers more productive. To sell effectively to schools, colleges and other education providers,


you have to enter each opportunity based on understanding how that particular organisation functions. You have to create budget and savings opportunities that are too big to ignore, particularly given how stressed and busy IT teams at these providers are. And lastly, you have to provide that understanding around how to consolidate security and other IT management processes, so that your prospects feel they are in safe hands. Bringing these three approaches together should equip you to be successful in education IT projects.


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