The entrustIT Education Desktop is a hosted IT solution for schools and colleges. It is specifically designed to address the major challenges in schools’ ICT provision:

1. Providing 24x7 access to a schools ICT infrastructure

• For both pupils and members of staff
• Whilst at school or when working from home

2. Increasing the PC to pupil ratio

• Without any corresponding increase in funding

3. Increasing the number of ICT services

• Without any corresponding increase in funding
• Reducing the amount of downtime or maintenance with the associated costs and lost productivity

The entrustIT education desktop directly addresses all of these issues:

• The school’s ICT services are provided from a dedicated data centre which is professionally managed, backed-up, and secured from external threats. This means that the school no longer needs to devote resources and budget to the day to day management of ICT infrastructure – instead the school’s ICT services are available to staff and pupils from anywhere at anytime - 24/7/365. All they need is access to the Internet.
• Because in-school equipment is used only to connect to the hosted service, with all processing now being done remotely, schools no longer need invest in traditional PCs - devices known as ‘thin clients’ can be used instead. These look and feel like high spec PCs, but have no internal processing capability – they simply connect to the remote service. Of course, without the internal complexity, thin clients are a fraction of the cost.
• The entrustIT desktop delivers a familiar Microsoft Windows environment and exploits Microsoft's "Software as a Service" licensing model. This means that the school can benefit from Microsoft education discounts and pays only a fixed monthly charge based on the total number of users. Furthermore, the reduced complexity of the equipment in-school means significant saving on hardware maintenance whilst support is delivered by us.
• The entrustIT education desktop provides an infrastructure which supports a whole school on a single coherent, secure network.

The solution provides

• support for pupils, teaching staff and administration staff, including provision for remote connection with full access to the IT
• secure data management, disaster recovery and malicious threat protection
• full email server capabilities and diary management / scheduling.
• shared drives and folders and central storage of school data
• ·the ability to schedule meetings across multiple calendars / diaries
• management and support service releasing school staff and budget from IT management issues.
• centralised deployment, licensing and management of software
• managed internet access, protecting pupils from unsavoury content and securing online communities from outside contact.