Experience in the private sector ranges from installations and support for small professional institutions such as solicitors, manufacturing companies and the motoring sector, to management and support of network infrastructures for large conference and leisure centres in the South West of England and beyond.

In all cases the fundamentals are the same – provision of a system which is robust, reliable, secure and easy to use by it’s end users. Not to mention the goal of keeping costs of licensing and hardware to a minimum, without any loss of functionality and performance.

Of course every organisation will have it’s bespoke requirements. Many companies use third party products for managing their particular sector of work, whether this be a specialist finance accounting system; a manufacturing project and workflow database; a dedicated customer records management service; and many others. In all these scenarios Brunel’s experience allows direct support of the services involved with high levels of knowledge of the usual back-end databases and storage mechanisms, plus the ability to work hand-in-hand with the service providers for rapid and accurate installation, maintenance and troubleshooting.

Secondary Schools

Network management, upgrading and support of secondary schools within a multi-school academy trust over a 10 year period.
Secondary schools are challenging environments for IT with robust services required for thousands of end users.
Security and on-line safety via stringent web-filtering and monitoring is of the utmost importance and a vital IT networking skill. Now with remote learning a vital teaching requirement, the demands on IT resources and budgets are high, requiring a greater depth of knowledge than ever before, along with experience of the extensive hardware, application and licensing markets to keep the costs to a minimum.
There is a greater need for full and secure access to teaching resources from outside of school. What has become essential is a central and secure online Learning Environment where pupils can access subject learning documents and multi-media; where teachers can create, upload and edit material for their classes; where administrative staff can securely create and manage documents, making them safely available for specific groups as necessary – and yet, such granular access must be seamless for the end user, whether from within school or at home, and remain inaccessible to persons outside of the school’s ‘security domain’.
Systems, such as Microsoft’s extensive “Sharepoint” platform and highly popular “Teams” application, can perform the function of seamless and secure access to centralised resources, on and off site, extremely well but require significant knowledge and experience to integrate into an existing school network and operate safely in a ‘hybrid’ fashion.

Primary Schools

Management and support of primary schools within a multi-school academy trust.
Of particular importance to primary schools is online safety and security. Stringent web filtering and firewall policies are a priority, yet allowing access to enough on-line material and resources to make the internet a fruitful, safe and fun place for supervised learning.
Primary schools have become extremely reliant on portable devices, such as laptops and tablets, for classroom learning. Choosing the correct devices for the primary school environment is part of the IT Management challenge. Devices must be robust (some will be dropped by children !), yet capable of running current programs and apps reliably, and all within the tight constraints of the IT budget. Keeping such devices safe from malware and operating systems up-to-date, and able to run the latest installed or online apps, is all part of the IT Management service.