COMPUTING & IT
Optimising IT infrastructure in education: how to save money all year-round
IAN SHEARER, Managing Director, APAC & EMEA at Park Place Technologies, shares his insights.
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secure, resilient and sustainable IT future is imperative for schools and universities. When schools start a new financial year, the pressure to squeeze every penny is more intense than ever. Regardless of whether schools and universities determine on a per-item basis to spend their money in the form of CapEx (capital expenditures) or OpEx (operational expenditures), the fundamental challenge remains the same: how can they invest in improving their IT infrastructure to underpin teaching, research and development costs within budget? There are concrete, clear paths that educational institutions can take to
ensure IT environments are resilient, secure, sustainable and fit-for-purpose, enabling educational institutions to make more intelligent decisions about the provision of affordable services and solutions.
CapEx is often a reflection of one-off investments (servers, storage, networking equipment and perpetual software licenses etc). OpEx budgets meanwhile pay for long-term expenses, like subscriptions (e.g IT subscription services, cloud services etc),with costs spread out expenses over time. The two approaches have their advantages. Importantly, IT investments should be
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made based on a number of strategic goals for the school’s overall strategic goals; however, systems should not only be capable of delivering value in the long haul.
Reliable IT is pivotal to avoiding disruption to research and learning. Resilience is making sure systems continue to function even when difficult obstacles may emerge. This is achievable through several options, outlined below. A good partner will help you determine which offerings will help your goals, rather than overwhelm you with unnecessary choices. • Cloud Services: Moving to using cloud-based tools for email, storage and collaboration lessens dependency on expensive, on-premises hardware. Thanks to its automatic update and back-up functionality and scalability, the cloud is also ideal for OpEx accounting.
• Managed IT Services – Outsourcing to managed service providers gives schools access to technical expertise at a lower cost than having a full-time IT team. They track systems, patch vulnerabilities, and provide quick support to maintain operations.
• IT Professional Services – These may be one-time needs such as a data centre relocation system/data migration, or IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) for example, and can be budget-busters if not prepared for.
• Virtualisation: This is important when running applications on a small number of physical devices, which helps save time and energy, and makes IT management easier. There are lots of virtualisation services which are easy to use and available to schools at reduced cost.
• Backup solutions – automated backups are a critical piece of protection from hardware failure and network attack. Backups and test recoveries should be routine.
October 2025
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