St Luke’s traditionally ran its core business applications on a virtualized infrastructure on its on-premises data center. These included applications for productivity and e-mail, as well as TASS.web, a web-based school administration system to manage payroll, accounts and students.

The virtualized infrastructure also ran some file components of the school website,

www.stlukes.qld.edu.au, which provides information about the school to prospective students, parents and other interested parties. However, low bandwidth Internet connections made downloading local files, (for example, fee structures and mission statements) from the website slow. The remainder of the website ran on an infrastructure provided by an Australian Internet provider, and the school found this was not flexible or cost-effective enough to meet its needs. St Luke’s also experienced occasional power outages that forced teachers and administration staff to temporarily adopt paper-driven processes. The outages also led to lost data, frustrating teachers and administrators and reducing productivity.

Furthermore, St Luke’s location in Bundaberg made it vulnerable to natural disasters, including local flooding. The school identified an on-campus fire as another risk. St Luke’s technology team realized that continuing to host its applications on-site was impractical. “In mid-2011, we moved our full website to a cloud hosting provider in Japan, and later that year migrated our business productivity software to an online suite of applications,” says Mitch Miller, the School’s IT Manager. "However, the hosted website environment in Japan was expensive and delivering unacceptably slow page loading times."

The TASS.web system was still running on-premises when a flood in 2013 effectively cut one side of Bundaberg off from the other, stopped power for 36 hours and shut the school down for a week. At that point, St Luke’s decided to move TASS.web into an environment where it could continue to operate in case of natural disaster. “This would allow us to use the system’s capabilities to mark off student rolls electronically on smartphones or iPads from evacuation points, rather than continuing to print copies daily in case of emergency,” says Miller. St Luke’s also wanted to take advantage of TASS.web’s ability to send mass updates to parents about emergencies and use TASS.web to create a virtual campus while its buildings were being repaired, ensuring students’ education was not disrupted.

Additionally, the technology team’s ability to perform software upgrades, general maintenance, endpoint deployments and other tasks was constrained because they had to dedicate two team members to reconfigure its on-premises infrastructure for two-month periods every three years. The school began to look for an affordable, scalable cloud solution that would offload infrastructure overhead.