Improving Site Reliability for the Education sector
Most governments have a department of education whose services are mission-critical for both children, teachers, and schools. The availability of these services can have detrimental effects on the welfare of children and the operations of schools.
What is SRE in education services?
Each school will have its own IT infrastructure which empowers teachers to teach and children to learn. This might include e-learning tools, online portals containing data such as grades and test scores, online exams, and access to the internet and intranets. They will also have their own electronic safeguarding system, pupil registrations, and software tools that empower children to work.
In addition to the individual services schools use, the department of education will also provide a range of services to teachers, schools, and families. These include:
- School applications
- Qualifications and exam grades
- Payment for school teachers & staff
- Child benefits
- School Inspections
The availability of these services is critical in providing good quality education and safeguarding kids.
The challenges of SRE within education
There are a number of challenges within the education sector when it comes to improving site reliability.
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Paper-based copies and legacy systems
How can those coexist with modern tools, while not making teachers and school personnel do twice the work?
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Non-technical users
How can you make sure they're not left aside, nor a threat to your system?
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Online learning and remote teaching
They're both an inclusivity tool, and sometimes a necessity. They also rely of a diverse range of hardware.
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Keeping up with regulations
How do you ensure your system is always behaving as it should?
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Keeping up with technology
Modern tooling can attract talents, teachers as well as students.
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Ensuring availability of services
Students sometimes pay large fees, and having to work a side job makes them rely on your services being available when they are.
What if your education services go down?
According to DataFoundry the cost of downtime ranges from $137 to $17,244 per minute. Although most education services are not financially motivated, there is a more human cost for service outages which impact schools across the world.
For example, if your government education services went down, there would be no way to access child benefits and it could also impact the payments for school teachers and staff.
Within a school, if your networks are hacked or fail this could prevent access to the internet which means teachers and children are limited in the way they are taught and learn.
Why educational institutions should focus on scaling reliable services
Education services must inspire reliability and trust in their users. In order to do this, governments must reduce risk and provide secure, reliable, resilient, and always available services for their schools.
We saw many schools struggle during Covid-19, who were not prepared for remote schooling and teaching online as a result of legacy systems and poor IT infrastructure.
The accelerating pace of online learning and always available services is constant, and the need to scale reliable services has never been greater.
How our tools improve SRE within education services
Different teams and departments will think about reliability differently and how it impacts schools, children, teachers, and families - Reliably provides the tools needed to reduce risk and provide secure, reliable, resilient, and always available services.
With Reliably you can
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Be SLO-oriented
Use an SLO oriented approach to reliability in financial services
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Score your System Health
Give a live view of system health through scoring
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Shift Reliability Left
Enable cultural shifts that promote and increase reliability
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Measure & Track Reliability
Define what a reliable system means to a team, and keep track of it
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Integrate Chaos Engineering
Proactively track weaknesses with Chaos Engineering
FAQ
- Does reliability improve user satisfaction within education?
- Yes, delivering on your SLOs is critical to developing and maintaining trust with your users. The cost of not delivering reliable services could result in complaints and frustration that lead to anxiety and stress within your teams.
- What are the qualities of good education services?
- Qualities of good education services include security and privacy, ease of use, and always available services.
- What is a shift-left culture in education?
- Shift-left culture in education means empowering IT staff and engineers in government education departments to be more proactive and mindful of their users’ experience and ensuring the availability and reliability of services.
- Can I try Reliably for free?
- Yes, sign up for free (no credit card required) and get started with defining and observing your reliability. You can cancel any time and you won't be charged anything.