Catholic Education Network (CEnet) takes to the cloud!

Today’s guest post is by Ian Gregory, Manager of IT Systems for CEnet


The Catholic Education Network (CEnet) provides and manages shared IT systems for over 300,000 students and 30,000 teachers and staff throughout Australia. Our users are spread across more than 740 sites in metropolitan, regional and rural areas of NSW, Queensland, Northern Territory and the ACT. 

CEnet’s members wanted to move to a next-generation messaging and collaboration platform that went beyond the realms of just plain old email. We have always been aware of the challenges involved in deploying services on a grand scale – IT in education is a big operation that is often underestimated. Naturally, maintaining systems of this scale requires a significant investment in time, cost and effort. The need to apply regular updates and patches, manage storage, plan for capacity and maintain individual staff and student access was something we dealt with on a day-to-day basis and something we believed was far more complex than it really needed to be. 

Working with our members, we decided to look for a solution that would establish a centralised resource for communication and collaboration and ultimately reduce the risk and cost of our on-premise services. Importantly, any solution needed to be aligned with a virtual learning environment paradigm that would evolve to support the learning initiatives of our members. It also needed to accommodate the expectations of the highly tech savvy generation Y and Z students who expect the same level of technology access in the classroom as they have at home. 

In the end, we selected Google Apps; its cost effectiveness, time-to-deploy and inherent capabilities were the key drivers behind the decision. The cloud computing solution lowers our management overheads, maintenance costs and effort. Importantly the functionality of Google Apps’ is also valuable and we can, and have, readily extended the system by utilising the Google Apps Marketplace. We also have the assurance that we’re staying in touch with the most up-to-date technology and meeting the needs and expectations of our students. As Google is constantly innovating, so are we. 

The initial rollout of Google Apps took only two weeks, a record in terms of delivering a platform of this scale- 330,000 users across our network. Our staff and students have the full suite of Google Apps at their fingertips: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sites, Google Groups and Google’s email content filtering capabilities. We are already seeing that Google Talk for instant messaging is becoming a popular way for staff and students to interact. The biggest benefit of Google Apps is the ability for our staff and students to share their ideas through a power-to-the-user philosophy. This is very different to the way we have operated in the past. Google Drive is now serving as a central resource for file storage, enabling planning and collaboration for both staff and students. This in itself makes group work for students easier, as they can create and edit their work wherever they are and the one central document is updated in real-time. 

As the IT managers and service providers, we have reduced the number of physical servers or virtual machines from over 30 to just the four. The whole IT ecosystem requires far less maintenance and the constant innovations and upgrades from Google do not require patches or hands-on IT staff time. CEnet, like the community it serves, is constantly changing. We are delighted with the benefits our decision has delivered already and know Google Apps will evolve as we do.