With overloaded on-premise servers and a lack of in-house Oracle expertise, Hills Road were facing issues maintaining and even accessing their finance system. By moving to the cloud they were able to offload these problems to bluQube.
A founding member of The Maple Leaf Group of leading English sixth form colleges, Hills Road is based in Cambridge and has around 2000 students split across full time AS & A Level courses and a part time adult education programme.
The college has one core campus, but also operates their Sport and Tennis Centre as an external limited company from an adjacent site - both of which operating under one unified bluQube finance system since 2002, with a combined turnover of £11m.
Hills Road College’s overloaded internal servers were causing far too frequent connectivity and storage space issues for the finance department and other IT systems college wide. This combined with an IT team lacking suitable Oracle database experience was resulting in system downtime and lost working time for both their core finance department of 7 and their additional 30 departmental users.
The answer to their issues was quite simple: move their system to the cloud. By operating bluQube in the cloud they no longer needed to rely on internal hardware and could minimise the workload on their in-house IT department.
“As soon as we were offered cloud everyone agreed it was the best option”
Now Hills Road are able to utilise market leading technology, hosted in a military grade data centre, with the cost of which covered by their supplier. They can also rest easy knowing bluQube’s team of Oracle experts, with over 20 years of expertise, are monitoring and maintaining their system 24/7, 365 days a year. And if something does go wrong, the cloud comes with all the additional levels of support they enjoyed as an SPP customer, and more, including 28 day database reversion, thorough penetration testing and all upgrades taken care of.
“Since going cloud we’re not losing working time as we had begun to with internal issues”
This is great news for both finance and IT. In fact, having made the switch, their finance system joins a whole host of other IT throughout the college operating in the cloud. A move strongly supported by their internal IT department.
Their Finance Manager commented on how little had actually changed to day to day working since moving to the cloud. With the exception of improved access and support, the system itself and the way staff are able to work continues to run in much the same way, causing no disruption to her and her team.
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