Partnerships for Schools harnesses Microsoft Azure

Government agency launches Free School Kit using the software giant's cloud platform

Partnerships for Schools (PfS), the government's delivery agent for capital investment programmes into schools, has launched a new service to the public using Azure, the cloud service from Microsoft.

The service is an online tool to help anyone proposing to open a Free School find suitable locations in their area.

The Free School Kit web site allows parent and community groups to explore the geographical area where they propose establishing a new school, helping them to understand more about the existing educational landscape.

Karl Hoods, head of information systems at PfS, explained that a move to the cloud was a natural extension of the organisation's IT strategy.

"It fits our strategy of becoming greener and more efficient, and it will help us manage peaks and troughs in demand. We're currently unsure about the demand the site will experience and the elasticity offered by the cloud is a real benefit to us."

Hoods said that he looked at Amazon initially, but that Azure was ultimately an easy choice.

"We had a brief look at Amazon EC2, but we have a Microsoft platform in-house. So using Azure means we're able to publish from our internal databases up to the cloud very easily."

He added that familiarity with the tools and applications helped with migrating the database to the cloud.

"It's seen as an extension of our internal environment," he said. "It would have been more effort and required more overall management to use another provider. Azure runs our SQL database, our own data feed and hosts the web site. That's everything we need."

Hoods found the launch phase of the project to be relatively straightforward thanks to the migration tools.

"The tools made available to migrate the database were easy to use. It fits right into our development environment, and we didn't need any support. We had one meeting with Microsoft, went away and migrated to the cloud."

The only problem he found was the lack of a Microsoft tool to synchronise their database to the cloud.

"We use a third-party tool to synchronise from our back-end database up to Azure. We couldn't find a Microsoft offering in that area, so we use a product from Red Gate. It would have been nice if there had been a Microsoft tool available."