City & Guilds considering cloud-based analytics to predict student grades

'It's about starting to use the powers of all these different technologies we've got, starting to make them come together,' says Ian Turfrey

Vocational education organisation City & Guilds is examining the potential of combining cloud tools with business insight in order to develop a picture of which students look like they're set to pass or fail courses.

That's according to Ian Turfrey, group board IT director at City & Guilds, who made the comments during a Computing and Zerto web seminar titled "Towards the platform-agnostic private cloud".

Turfrey is a shortlisted finalist for CIO of the Year at Computing's UK IT Industry Awards 2015.

City & Guilds provides skills and education on a global level to a current user base of two million people, with students able to take courses in over 80 different countries. That's led to what Turfrey described as "commoditisation" of IT with Microsoft in which email, SharePoint, One Drive and video conferencing are all hosted in the cloud.

The benefit, Turfrey explained, is that having someone else take care of that infrastructure means that the issue of how IT operates "isn't keeping me awake at night" and "if I'm having a conversation with the CEO, I want to be talking about strategy, not about the nuts and bolts", he said.

City & Guild's telecommunications infrastructure is also cloud based, with the organisation having adopted ICON Communicate from Azzurri Communications last year, enabling users to access services whatever device they're logging in from.

"We've got a desktop which follows the user around. We have telecommunications that's fully outsourced as well and we have different SaaS [software-as-a-service] programmes, something which is very propriety to what we do in our industry," Turfrey said, describing the cloud-based IT infrastructure during the Computing and Zerto web seminar.

"And we're now building our engines as platform-as-a-service," he added, describing City & Guild's strategy as "cloud first".

Turfrey went on to detail how the organisation is looking into "more predictive analytics" with Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform.

"It's about looking at the Azure machine, combining that with the power of BI [business intelligence] to start looking at how learners are doing these types of courses, examine who's likely to pass, who's likely to fail," he explained.

"It's about starting to use the powers of all these different technologies we've got, starting to make them come together and start looking at very interesting opportunities at City & Guilds," Turfrey concluded.

Earlier in the Computing web seminar, Turfrey warned how businesses need to be cautious when adopting a hybrid cloud solution, because even though the concept can bring benefits of scalability, there are circumstances where it can prove to be more expensive than keeping data on premise.

"You have to be very, very careful, in cloud, especially if some of these things are new, it's very quick for people to put prices up very fast and if you don't apply the right licensing tariffs associated with it, you can get a bit of a bill shock," he said.