Leading South East Academy chooses SEGfL Managed Internet

St Catherine’s College in Eastbourne, East Sussex is part of the Diocese of Chichester Academy Trust (DCAT) and has over 1000 pupils between the ages of 11 and 16. As with many schools, DCAT has increasingly migrated school systems to the cloud over several years. Today all its administrative systems and application software are based in the cloud which offers a high level of flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness, not only for secure access to the very best teaching and learning resources but also administrative systems. However, vital to the continuous availability of any cloud-based IT solution is a reliable connection to the Internet.

The Challenge

Earlier this year, following a prolonged period of intermittent internet outages, Marc Mulhern, DCAT’s Head of IT & Innovation and Madeleine Maynard, St Catherine’s College Business Manager, knew it was high time to take decisive action. They commenced the search for a permanent solution to the persistent and disruptive connection problem.

“Over the years, the added stress of dealing with the fallout from internet outages had become a necessary part of day-to-day life,” said Marc Mulhern. “However, after a prolonged outage at St Catherine’s it was obvious our total reliance on the cloud meant that our schools cannot function as and when systems become unavailable due to Internet outage. This includes everything from taking the register, teaching and learning, home working, and even taking payment for lunches.”

“While we had a back-up network circuit in place our standard leased line was dependent on a single exchange which was the weakest link,” added Madeleine. “What we needed was a more resilient internet circuit to always ensure the delivery of the high-quality teaching and learning our pupils deserve and expect.”

Project Requirement

On behalf of St Catherine’s College, Marc and Madeleine asked Schools ICT who are members of the South East Grid for Learning (SEGfL) to propose and procure a cost effective option that met their School and Academy IT Strategy. One which would exceed DfE standards and provided the highest level of resilience.

Key decision criteria included:

• Resilient Internet connection for reliable access to cloud-based schools systems
• Diverse fibre connection to multiple exchanges
• DfE compliant
• No single point of failure
• Robust content filtering and firewall protection with offsite device filtering
• DDoS protection

The Solution

Schools ICT/SEGfL with advice from MLL Telecom who supply the South East Grid framework, which is available to all public sector bodies in the South East of England, recommended diverse routing into the college. This would be achieved by deploying SEGfL Managed Internet circuits which included separate routers and cabinets on different floors as well as fibre routed back to different exchanges via two different internet carriers. Crucially, the network would run in an Active/Active state so both circuits would be utilised at the same time, allowing the college to have increased bandwidth for harnessing the resilient circuit internet capacity, rather than it not being used for 99.9% of the time.

Following St Catherine’s acceptance of this proposal, the network circuits were installed by MLL within a matter of weeks. These utilise two Fortinet CPE appliances with software defined (SD-WAN) capability, along with Fortinet Firewall and Smoothwall Internet Filtering. All exceeding DFE, KCSIE and NEN standards.

As a multi-vendor managed network solutions provider, MLL Telecom was also able to leverage its strong relationships with both CityFibre and Openreach to enable diverse carrier connections into separate nearby exchanges in Eastbourne and Pevensey.

Results and Benefits

During June 2024, DCAT’s Marc Mulhern was able to test the failover process thoroughly. With either of the individual circuits disconnected, the college maintained consistent internet connectivity, allowing seamless access to all its cloud-based systems.

“The testing process over two weeks was very smooth. In my opinion, as schools become increasingly cloud-dependent they need to take the highly resilient network approach we have successfully implemented at St Catherine’s College.” Marc Mulhern

“By eliminating the disruption caused by internet outages, St Catherine’s now has the added confidence and peace of mind of being able to consistently deliver our pupils the very best teaching and learning experience. We were very pleased from the responsive advice and service we received from Keith Renshaw at Schools ICT/SEGfL.” Madeleine Maynard

On behalf of Schools ICT and the South East Grid for Learning, Keith Renshaw concluded: “We are delighted that Schools ICT together with our partner MLL have been able to specify and implement a highly resilient and secure managed connectivity solution at St Catherine’s College, part of a leading academy trust in the region. We are confident this will meet their requirements for reliable cloud access for many years to come.”