As the rise in blended learning and different ways of teaching continues, organisations at all levels are increasingly relying upon resources held online, which has its problems as well as its advantages.
With students now expecting to be able to work online from different locations or outside normal hours, cloud-based applications make it easier to deliver blended learning and provide a consistent learner experience across devices. However, connecting users wherever they are with the cloud-based workloads to which they need access can be complex and expensive.
The Janet Network provides secure, fast, reliable connectivity to UK universities and colleges. But what if your institution doesn’t have a Janet connection? Or if you urgently need a connection but it’s not happening fast enough? Or if you’re simply having to cut costs wherever you can? Jisc’s managed SD-WAN service (software-defined wide area network) may be the answer.
Extending reach
Our vision is to extend the reach of Janet beyond the private, physical lines to which it has traditionally been limited so that we can offer more flexible options in terms of costs, consumption and speed of delivery with additional options providing leased lines and broadband connectivity. As part of that vision, we are currently working on making centrally-managed SD-WAN functionality available over the powerful, reliable Janet Network – with or without a physical connection.
SD-WAN technology offers a reliable, scalable, affordable way to connect students to the Janet Network. For organisations without a fixed connection to Janet, a managed SD-WAN service will enable you to use any internet connection, including broadband, fibre, wifi and satellite. This will give learners access to a wealth of cloud-based applications that can scale rapidly, be accessed from anywhere, and seamlessly integrate with one another to deliver the best learner experience.
What if your institution doesn’t have a Janet connection? Jisc’s SD-WAN service may be the answer.
Secure connectivity
More and more institutions are opting for cloud-hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions of learning management systems, productivity tools such as Microsoft 365, and collaboration solutions like Teams or Zoom. SD-WAN improves the performance of these applications by simplifying network operations and reducing latency, which is particularly important in education settings that use voice, video or live feeds. With Jisc’s managed SD-WAN service, our leading cyber service security features, such as DDoS protection, advanced DNS and malware protection are included – protecting learners and giving you increased peace of mind. It also makes it easier to get visibility into the network in order to manage it and make changes from a single location, saving time and effort for IT teams.
Fast connectivity
The provisioning of an MPLS connection can take months, if MPLS is available at all. In contrast, SD-WAN offers a much faster deployment, making it a more agile and cost-effective solution. New buildings, offices or campuses can be provisioned and brought online quickly and easily, sometimes without the involvement of an on-site network engineer. In fact, we’ve already demonstrated the value of the SD-WAN service by deploying it at a sixth-form school that was affected by the RAAC crisis. Within 10 days, we were able to provide them with connectivity and web filtering where delivering an OpenReach circuit could have potentially taken months.
Affordable connectivity
To effectively deliver blended learning, institutions must constantly improve and upgrade their network infrastructures. At a time when rising costs are the primary concern across the sector, this inevitably incurs capital expenditure and ongoing maintenance costs. SD-WAN can reduce costs by, for example, prioritising traffic and using lower-cost links for applications that are less important or less performance-sensitive. Ultimately, a managed service saves time and resources: organisations will be able to reduce the operational expenses of network administration by entrusting it to Jisc.
To find out more about Jisc’s SD-WAN service, email us at [email protected]
We will also be at the IHE Annual Conference 2024 in Westminster on the Tuesday 26 November. Come and speak to us.
Guy Easterbrook
Guy has a wealth of experience in the provision of communication services to meet the needs of users in both the education and public sectors and in the introduction of new products and services that embody advances in technology.
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