Runshaw College Trusts Extreme and FourNet for a Digital Transformation

In a peaceful, wooded area just outside of Leyland, Runshaw College serves some 5,000 students. With 14 buildings and 650 staff, this single campus learning institution had an ageing network infrastructure that was working overtime to keep up with the demands of a predominantly commuting student population.

Ageing hardware hadn’t been properly refreshed in a number of years, with the last major investment having been all the way back in 2014. For Alex Harding, Head of IT Services and Data Protection Officer at Runshaw, there were several concerns lining up.

Hearing What Students Want, Addressing What Educators Need

“A lot of the hardware was past the end of support, including our core switching, and like many in our industry, we had budget constraints to consider,” Alex said. “Then we consider student life and what they ask for—which students' number one piece of feedback is always Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi.”

Deeper than that common refrain, there were cybersecurity issues to consider. With growing cyberthreats targeting education, Alex and his team of 16 people knew that they needed better visibility across a unified system of updated hardware and connections. They also knew this would mean learning a new technology.

“Fabric is very different than the traditional spanning tree we had with Cisco. I think it was like wizardry, like what the heck is this?” Alex laughs at the beginning of his experience with Extreme Fabric. 

Aside from getting familiar with a new approach to networking, Alex and his team were concerned about providing a cybersecure, efficient network for all the demands students and staff placed on the current infrastructure.

“It’s about staff needs, it’s about network stability, but we’ve also got to make sure our teams can feel confident in the security of these new technologies,” he said. “Our previous solutions were disjointed, didn’t always interlink.”

Crafting the Right Approach for Runshaw’s Big Update

Runshaw brought in FourNet, a partner with experience helping educational institutions secure their digital transformations within the often-limited budgets common to the industry. After considering options like Dell, Runshaw chose Extreme Networks for its scalable technology, hands-on sales and engineering teams, and a price tag that allowed Runshaw to access everything they needed within an attainable budget. 

With partner FourNet and Extreme helping devise the right plan for Runshaw, the teams devised plans for modernizing the campus-wide network infrastructure:

  • They’d adopt Wi-Fi 6 in the new install, ensuring robust connectivity and reliable performance across the entire campus.
  • An integration of ExtremeCloudIQ and Extreme Access Points, along with Site Engine, would provide a better picture of the overall network and make it easier to address issues on the fly.
  • User-friendly automation capabilities would position IT staff and end users for a better overall experience.

Maintaining compatibility with some older equipment helped Runshaw transition into the new upgrades with flexibility and speed. At the same time, Alex and his team were able to get hands-on training to make sure they would have deep knowledge of the new solutions and capabilities on Day 1.

“Extreme has some incredible engineers, very open and willing to share their knowledge and understanding,” Alex said of the process. “We wanted that deep understanding of what we were deploying.” Once the team was trained up and ready, Runshaw began the roll out, which took place over an eight-week period in stages. 

“It was a couple of switches a night, a couple of classrooms a night,” said Alex.

Quantifying Results, Experiencing the Difference

In the time since the project was completed, Alex says, Runshaw has experienced a complete shift in how it operates its network. 

“Financially, we know what we’re paying for the next five years, and we know it’s all going to be under support the whole time,” he said. “It’s been stable since day one, we don’t have a single issue. And from a resource perspective, it’s vastly decreased the load on our team thanks to the automations we can leverage.”

This includes reducing basic administrative time by an impressive 80 percent, Alex reports. 

“80 percent of that manual, time-consuming work we were doing has just gone away,” he said. “It’s plug and forget at this point, plus we can roll out security updates, firmware updates and the like so easily. It reduces a month’s long piece of work into one night.”

What was once a lengthy, heavily manual process for these types of updates has now been slashed by close to 97 percent.

“(Previously) It would be every night for a month, at least for a few hours to do this across campus,” Alex recalled. “Now it’s literally an hour or two for just one evening after classes conclude, which means we can stay on top of it. That’s been the biggest advantage.”

This efficiency and visibility—along with the automations that hasten it along—allows Runshaw to stay ahead of the growing cyberthreats that plague more educational institutions. But when he looks ahead, Alex says, he feels like Runshaw is well positioned for the future.

“The most important thing for us is having a trusted partner that truly understands the whole ecosystem and is willing to share their knowledge with us. There are undoubtedly more efficiencies we’re going to uncover over time.”