Solutions for schools
Most schools have their in-house IT systems, which usually includes email servers, FTP servers, web hosting and file sharing systems.
However, teachers often need to work from home, and students need do their homework at home. To access in-house systems securely requires VPN solution. As many teachers (and students) are not tech savvy, it requires a lot of training and tech support. Moreover, as students graduate and more are brought in, such training and support becomes a long term recurring cost. A cloud-based solution can be more useful for schools than for other types of businesses.
DriveHQ cloud IT solution can dramatically improve the IT service for schools and reduce the system and support cost. With our solution, a teacher can easily create a group account for his class. He can create sub-accounts for his students. The teacher will have full control over the sub-accounts, and can automatically create a folder for each sub-user sharing to different students with different permissions.
The teacher can copy and paste assignments to a group shared folder with read-only access, and the students can upload their completed home work to a folder shared by the teacher. As mobile devices become a primary source of data collection, the teachers and students will want to use their smart phones or tablets to access the system. DriveHQ has native apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone.
Example 1: Co-branded Cloud IT system for a university
A university in Florida is planning a major infrastructure upgrade. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on in-house servers, they decided to look for cloud-based solutions.
They have looked at dropbox and Amazon Web Service. They were not impressed by the features offered by Dropbox, nor were they happy with the $180/user/year price tag, plus it lacks access control feature.
AWS has a lot of hype and appears to be low-cost; as they carefully
analyze the service, they realize the following problems with AWS:
- AWS is mainly IaaS (Infrastructure as a service). If they use AWS, they still need to install and configure software on the virtual machines remotely. They still need to manage and maintain such servers, install security patches.
- For the teachers and students to access the system, they still need VPN solutions and to provide support for teachers in creating and managing user accounts. It does not reduce their support work.
- While AWS saves cost initially, they charge for storage space, download bytes, server requests and virtual machines monthly. Over time, the costs quickly add up.
With DriveHQ’s solution, the university now has a powerful remote file server for all students and teachers, which allows them to easily share files and collaborate from anywhere.
Not only did they save the initial hardware and software cost, but DriveHQ also reduces their maintenance and support cost.
Plus, starting at only $4/user/month and with the special discount for non-profit organizations and schools,
they were able to achieve 90% cost savings over competing services such as Dropbox and Box.
With over 10,000 students and 3,000 faculty members, DriveHQ’s discounted price is only $24,000/year.
Example 2: Department level or class-level Cloud Service
Many tech savvy teachers and students are ahead of their school’s IT department. Many teachers and departments use DriveHQ service within their classes or departments.
It can be done easily, and if the school later adopts DriveHQ service for the entire school, all the accounts and data will be kept intact.
For any plans over 20GB storage space, or 20 user licenses, DriveHQ can offer special educational discount. Please make sure to contact DriveHQ sales to get the special discount.
Example 3: Online schools and remote education / training organizations
Need we say anything more? DriveHQ Cloud IT solution is the perfect match for such organizations. Best of all, such organizations are still qualified for a special educational discount!
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