Suffolk County Council has signed Capita to migrate its on-premise education management software to a cloud based system.
Under a five-year deal worth £1.3 million, the company will move the council’s statutory education functions – such as managing admissions, school transport, meals and special educational needs – to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) built on the Microsoft Azure platform.
It said that once the council’s data has been migrated it will be able to carry out upgrades and fixes remotely out of regular working hours; in contrast to the manual changes to the legacy system made during the working day.
It also said the change will provide the council with predictive analysis and data on areas where it could optimise services, and enable it to share data with neighbouring authorities moving to the cloud – citing Essex County Council as an example.
Simon Reed, head of IT service and operations for Suffolk County Council, said: “We are constantly working with our schools to understand how services can be delivered in a more efficient way.
“Migrating our education services to the cloud will improve how we support schools. It will also place us in a very good position to extend our collaboration with other councils in the future.”
Image by Flazinga Photos, CC BY 2.0
