GoCloud hosted desktops help the education sector deliver secure and accessible services.
Recent events have shown that even a sector as hands-on as education can function effectively from remote locations.
With educators creating lesson plans, marking work, having meetings and even teaching students from their homes via video conferencing software, it’s clear that you don’t necessarily all have to be in the same room to be an effective teacher.
Thanks to hosted desktops, your teachers, lecturers and non-teaching staff have access to all of the files, folders, emails and applications they need no matter where they’re based.
Even when the teaching arrangement is running as normal, hosted desktops enable employees to collaborate as if they were working on laptops whilst sitting next to each other in the staff room.
It truly is a remarkable way of working, which opens up endless
opportunities for making the learning journey as rich and
interactive as possible.
Educational organisations come with a tremendous amount of data, the vast majority of which is confidential.
From student grades and personal information, to contact details, staff payroll, marketing activity, budgets, board documents and stakeholder engagement, the last thing you want is a data breach that results in the damage, loss or theft of sensitive data.
Hosted desktops from GoCloud completely remove the risk of this happening and also make GDPR compliance a smooth and easy process.
All of this is achieved through the following security features:
With so much digital information constantly being added and stored, the education sector requires a huge amount of equipment to keep up with demand.
It’s not just the computers and laptops we’re talking about here, as you also need the servers that host the data, as well as maintenance staff and regular upgrades for both software and hardware.
It almost sounds too good to be true, but the vast majority of these associated costs are heavily reduced or even removed completely when you switch to hosted desktops.
First of all, hosted desktops put far less strain on hardware, helping to significantly decrease the amount of electricity you use whilst lengthening the machine’s lifespan.
Then there’s the servers – since your desktops are hosted in our secure UK data centres, you no longer need to run your own.
This means further reduction of energy consumption, as the hefty hardware can be removed and you don’t even have to worry about maintaining an air conditioned server room.
Due to hosted desktops being accessible on any kind of PC, Mac, Linux machine, laptop, iPad, iPhone or Android device, your ongoing investment in hardware is also drastically reduced.
Staff can even work, collaborate and communicate using their hosted desktops on their personal laptops and phones, plus this benefit even extends to students who are allocated their own hosted desktops.
Last but by no means least, any old hardware that’s due an upgrade can instead be replaced with very affordable thin clients.
These machines are specifically designed to access a hosted
desktop via the internet, making them cheap to run whilst using
much less electricity than a traditional desktop computer.
You may have guessed by this point, but hosted desktops also greatly benefit your students.
With the ability to access information, presentations, tutorials, digital activities and video lessons extremely easily, as well as share their own work, they have everything they need to prepare themselves for the highly digitised career landscape of the future.
Book a demo with one of our cloud experts and see how easily you can move your IT to the cloud.
"Using the GoCloud technology is just like sitting in the office anyway, so there's never any loss of work time."
"There were no upfront capital costs, we could save on energy bills, and we could pay for their service monthly."
"The service is incredibly reliable and since working with them we have had a smooth, fast and stable platform."
Find answers to more popular questions by visiting our FAQs.
You are able to download your data whenever you want. Depending on how much data you have, you can copy the data via a mapped drive, download via FTP, or we can send you USB hard drives.
A hosted desktop is a Windows desktop containing your applications, which you use to access your files and data from. Files can be stored on a hosted file server, data can be on a database server such as SQL Server. Our hosted desktop service comes with the desktops, file server and a firewall, all dedicated to you and not shared with other customers.
No. Customers can use any PC, Mac or Linux machine to connect to their hosted desktop. One of the initial cost-savings is the ability to continue to use existing PCs. As the processing power, memory, and storage are provided by our servers, customers are even able to use older PCs that would be unable to run a new Operating System themselves, thereby extending their working lives and ROI. Alternatively, you may decide to supply thin clients, to further enhance the benefits of moving to a hosted desktop environment. Thin clients are physically smaller PCs; they cost less than a normal PC (aka a "fat client"), and use a lot less energy. Of course, as a hybrid measure they may opt to simply replace existing computers with thin clients as they begin to fail. Hosted desktops will also work on laptops, tablet devices such as the iPad and smartphones such as the iPhone.
Firstly, we recommend using a backup internet service if required, such as ADSL or a dongle if mobile. Secondly, if you lose your connection to your hosted desktop, when you regain your connection, your desktop is exactly as you left it, with all applications and data intact.