Working in Education

FourNet delivers networking, security, and collaboration solutions for some of the UK’s leading education providers, including Universities, Colleges, Schools, and Multi-Academy Trusts.

We understand the challenges faced in delivering an adaptable, responsive, and scalable way to deliver learning, and the need to be able to respond quickly to the ever-changing needs of the learning environment for today and longer-term goals.

Our Vision

With the digital revolution, education must allow interactive, secure and reliable access to learning tools and information. How knowledge is delivered has now blended with in-person and remote learning for many institutions, and more than ever, education relies on technology to power the learning environment across many different systems and learning platforms.

Your technology, plays a pivotal role in pedagogy, and staff, students, and parents' expectations about how technology will facilitate learning have never been higher.

At FourNet, our broad experience across Universities, Colleges, MAT and K12 education provides us with the insight needed to deliver the right infrastructure, technology, and security solutions to ensure that you provide the right learning tools and experience for students.

We strive to remain at the forefront of Edtech and working in partnership, deliver the right solutions to remove the complexity of managing your IT estate and find cost-effective ways to drive the right outcomes for management and students.

Our Expertise

We provide state-of-the-art infrastructure, cloud, collaboration, unified communications, and security solutions that enable you to securely deliver the best experience for staff and students. FourNet offers innovative, award-winning solutions that deliver the right tools and technologies to provide secure and intelligent collaboration and communication for your School, College, or Academy members.

FourNet's cloud-first approach is key for many organisations as it can provide effective budget-friendly solutions to enhance the right level of student satisfaction, staff room and back office teams.

Whether you are a college, School or MAT, you will benefit from the support, value and experience we can deliver, all tailored to your needs. From connectivity to Classroom, server room to Cyber security, we can ensure you have the right solutions and services.

Challenges in Education

Hybrid Learning

Hybrid learning entirely depends on the technology and platforms working efficiently and effectively. For example, a failure in speed or function can quickly see a student's mind wander elsewhere and impact the learning environment for everyone.

Your network is a pivotal element in delivering a hybrid learning environment and must be robust and reliable to empower the Edtech tools used for lessons. Unstable or slow internet can severely impact the ability to deliver the correct levels of service to students affecting performance, well-being and outcomes.

Collaboration

Collaboration is key to success in education, but there are a number of challenges that must be overcome. Students and educators need to be able to collaborate both in person and remotely, which means that not only must there be enough space for each person to have their own device, but those devices must be able to work together in order for the collaboration process to be effective.
This can make it difficult for students who may have older or newer technologies than their peers, as well as those who bring their own devices into the classroom environment.

The ability to accommodate multiple devices and platforms requires a collaboration solution that can work across multiple systems and technologies. These challenges can impact on student learning time and the efficiency within the environment to deliver effective education.organisation to future-proof itself.

Organisations and contact centres are becoming much more reliant on building a flexible workforce and cloud technology enables this shift. FourNet prides itself in tailoring solutions to meet customer needs. Depending on your business or organisation, there are a variety of options available.

Digital Integration

Education is undergoing a massive transformation, with technology becoming a key component in improving teaching and learning processes.
Many institutions have made significant investments in IT systems, but these systems are often siloed and need to cooperate or communicate with each other.
This can lead to inefficiencies and redundancies across educational technology applications. Technological efficiency relies on smooth integration, interoperability and coordination across all teaching and learning applications.

This is a growing challenge facing many institutions as IT systems become less monolithic and disparate across various products and services.

Cyber Security

Education is changing rapidly. With the rise in online learning and digital communications, it is more important than ever to ensure that your institution's network security is up to date. Cyber Attacks within the sector are on the rise, with the sector experiencing a significant increase over the last few years. This poses a considerable challenge because of the time, money and resources required to enhance network security.

Technological efficiency relies on smooth integration, interoperability and coordination across all teaching and learning applications.
This is a growing challenge facing many institutions as IT systems become less monolithic and more disparate across varying products and services utilised.

Business Continuity, Risk & Resilience

Whether it's a natural disaster or pandemic impacting the learning environment, having appropriate business continuity strategies, and plans in critical in the digital world.

Ensuring that you have effective backups and recovery measures or can failover to implement a continuation of services is a critical element in IT planning. However, for many organisations, this requires adequate IT resources, expertise and time, which can sometimes be challenging when caught up in the everyday demands of running IT.

Legacy Networks & Hardware

For some organisations being able to keep up to date and deliver the latest learning innovations can be a challenge on older legacy networks and hardware. With the desire to move to a secure cloud-first environment, this can be prohibitive what to change and when and the impact of change can be a blocker to taking steps to refresh or migrate to a faster, more resilient network.

How we can help

Secure Infrastructure

FourNet's Secure Infrastructure solutions ensure that your connectivity and network are always available, prioritise user experience and application performance, and protect you against cyber-security threats.

Our expertise in transitioning our customers to the cloud extends to all layers of the tech stack. From networking and infrastructure to the application layer, our expertise makes it all work together. Our service keeps everybody secure and productive, with the flexibility to respond quickly to changing work patterns.

Cloud

Cloud technology increases efficiency, flexibility, security, and competitiveness. It gives customers in education greater control over their resources, is easy to scale up or down based on demand and enables an organisation to future-proof itself.

With flexible hybrid learning and collaboration, in-demand cloud technology enables this shift. FourNet prides itself on tailoring solutions to meet customer needs. Depending on your business or organisation, various options are available.

Collaboration & Unified Communication

Simplify the back office and working environment with FourNet's help. Choosing the right Collaboration platforms and Unified Communications will unite all the tools your staff need to connect, share and work together via the same streamlined interface. That means all voice calls, voicemail, video, presence, and instant messaging can be accessed from the same screen. It also allows scheduling, conferencing, and screen and document sharing

FourNet - bringing everything together.

A.I & Automation

Technology has advanced rapidly over the last few years, and AI solutions are now becoming embedded in most environments. From self-service and AI-powered agent assistance technologies to fully AI-enabled contact centre solutions and Robotic Process Automation, we have a full range of AI & Automation solutions to help increase efficiency and improve both the student and staff experience.

Microsoft Teams

If MS Teams is part of your organisation's technology portfolio, FourNet can help you maximise your Teams environment.

It's clear that Teams is here to stay, and there are many ways that we can help you to optimise your Teams environment. Whether it's analysing user data to understand adoption and engagement, enabling hybrid video meetings with users in your team and others joining remotely, or integrating Teams into the contact centre, FourNet has a range of solutions that can help.

Business Continuity

Organisations must plan for and respond to a wide range of incidents and emergencies that could affect the ability to deliver learning. FourNet's Disaster Recovery solutions help provide emergency preparedness, resilience, and response (EPRR) plans, ensure business continuity, and reduce the risk of impacting learning in the event of a disaster: whether this is site unavailability or a malicious cyberattack.

Our solutions offer the highest levels of resilience and redundancy, guaranteeing 99.999% availability of service.

"We've moved from a situation where we had a very large flat network to a subnetted architecture with VLANs per location. We now have a very stable core network that has really moved us on in terms of flexibility and resilience. From there we've been able to overlay crucial new services such as CCTV, VOIP, retail systems, and also staff and student data services."

Steve Keating

Leeds Beckett University

Further Resources

Leeds Beckett University Implement Extreme Networks

Education

Security

Find out More

AI and Automation White Paper

AI and Automation

Find out More

Back to Business – A hybrid workforce White Paper

Central Government

Cloud Solutions

Find out More

Get in Touch

Complete the form opposite and a member of the Fournet team will be in touch to see how we can help