Buying servers upfront costs thousands. They become outdated in 3-5 years.
Need more capacity for exam season? Buy more hardware. Wait 6 weeks for delivery.
One server dies, an entire department stops working. No redundancy.
Pay only for what you use. Burst during Freshers Week, scale down in summer.
Students and staff connect from any device, any location, any time.
Microsoft manages the physical servers. You manage the services.
OpEx not CapEx. No massive upfront costs. Predictable budgets.
80+ GPU workstations need <1ms response. Cloud gives 40-60ms. For real-time gaming and rendering, that's unacceptable.
UK GDPR says sensitive research data can't leave the campus. Cloud servers are in Dublin or London — too far.
If the internet fails, students can't log in. Active Directory and DNS must work locally, always.
Running 50 VMs around the clock in the cloud = £36,000/year. For predictable workloads, that's too expensive.
The bridge connecting local servers to cloud management
Software-defined storage — replaces traditional SANs
Virtualisation for running VMs on local hardware
Kubernetes for modern containerised applications
80+ GPUs, <1ms needed
Wireless headsets, no lag
Full control over data location. No cross-border transfer questions.
NHS and government data must stay on physical campus servers.
Azure Policy, Backup, and Defender protect local data from the cloud.
Stoke servers, London servers, and Cloud resources — all managed from one Azure Portal. One skill set for the whole team.
Apply security patches to all servers at once. Monitor health from anywhere. No separate tools needed.
Scales up, internet-facing
80+ stations, <1ms needed
Accessed everywhere, any device
Hundreds of feeds, process locally
Global visitors, CDN, auto-scaling
Must stay on campus physically
Mobile-first, anytime access
Must work if internet is down
Ask in plain English
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