Interactive migrating NSW's Amity College to Azure

Managed services provider Interactive is migrating NSW-based Amity College's on-premises IT infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.

Amity College, which comprises five schools in three campuses, partnered with Interactive for hardware maintenance support earlier in 2022. With some of its devices no longer under warranty, the college needed a provider that could maximise the lifespan of its infrastructure, "despite supplier restrictions".

The college was dealing with temperamental, end-of-life infrastructure and servers that were reaching storage capacity.

“It’s lucky we partnered with Interactive when we did because within a couple of days of signing the contract, we needed their support for one of our critical pieces of infrastructure. Interactive was on-site in a couple of hours and had it back up and running with little to no impact to our operations”, said Shailesh Singh, ICT Director, Amity College.

A decision was made to migrate the school's IT to Microsoft Azure cloud, with the college aiming to complete the migration by the end of 2022. Interactive will continue as the college's managed services partner, optimising its cloud usage and costs.

“We didn’t make this decision flippantly," said Amity College executive principal, Mehmet Koca said. "We heard from three other managed service providers, as well as Interactive. None came close to the contract flexibility that Interactive offers. We require the space to scale up and down as needed and not to be restricted by rigid provider contracts.”

Commenting on the benefits for parents and their children, Koca said “It went from pen and paper to computers to dial up to Wi-Fi. Moving to the cloud is the next step forward and it’s the right time for us. Parents want their kids to be exposed to new technology and have digital literacy skills. For that to happen, we need a resilient technology foundation to support the next generation,” Koca said.

The school is seeing financial benefits from its partnership with Interactive. “Importantly, our IT costings have now moved from CAPEX to OPEX, and we’re enabled to rationalise costs and make savings upfront. We wouldn’t have been able to do this alone and so effectively”, Singh said.