Barton Peveril Sixth Form College goes cloud-first with Google Cloud to improve student experience and support AI innovation

From plans to complete migration in nine months

When Barton Peveril committed to a migration of all its on-premises infrastructure and services to Google Cloud, it needed to be up and running within a nine-month period. With its existing licences coming up for renewal during that timeframe, it needed to be all-in on Google Cloud before the expiry date.

Working with SoftwareOne, the college used the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) procurement framework to simplify the onboarding process with Google Cloud. OCRE provides access for academic and research institutions across Europe and connects them with pre-approved providers offering cost-effective cloud pricing. SoftwareOne is a leading Google Cloud partner in 16 countries on the OCRE framework, supporting academic and research institutions in more than 35 European countries.

For Loveday, the logic of migrating to Google Cloud was clear and obvious. “The Google name buys something, there’s an assurance that comes with it,” he says. “You know it’s cooperative, resilient, robust, and secure. We did our due diligence on alternative cloud providers, but having a connected ecosystem from the same provider will improve efficiency and the ability to operate within the domain.”

Educational organisations rely on a complex estate of applications and systems to deliver services and systems, and the links between these need to be identified. A key early activity for the project team was data flow mapping to ensure that when systems were migrated, no interdependencies between them were broken. The planning process began.

Looking for a solution that complemented existing Google Cloud services

The college has a lean IT team, so it wanted an IT partner that could help plan, then execute, the migration on its behalf. The college explained its systems, objectives, and priorities, then handed the reins to SoftwareOne. With the planning and technical decisions made, the team had around four months to migrate the college’s entire digital infrastructure to Google Cloud.

The college wanted a digital infrastructure and ecosystem that complemented and enhanced its existing Google Cloud services and tools. Crucially, these included AI agents that the college had built using the unified Vertex AI platform. These included Barton Buddy, a tool aimed at students with information on timetabling, homework deadlines, and campus information, and Barton AI, a tool that supported staff with teaching, administration, and pastoral care.

These agents provided valuable information services for students and staff. Although that initiative had started the year prior to the migration, being native on Google Cloud meant that everything was starting to converge into one ecosystem, giving the college AI team a roadmap for future development and improved security guardrails.

The project team migrated less-critical systems during term time with the key systems moved over to Google Cloud during the summer holidays. Despite the challenging deadline, the college’s entire infrastructure was migrated a few days ahead of schedule with no operational downtime or inefficiencies.

In addition to the migration, the college signed up for a five-year managed services arrangement with SoftwareOne to manage its infrastructure. With a lean IT team, Loveday wanted his team to focus on supporting student services rather than on managing cloud infrastructure, something that would have required a steep learning curve. Instead of having to pay for an always-on on-premises system, the college wanted to run and pay for only the services it used. It specifically wanted the agility to scale down operations during holidays and term breaks.

The managed services contract means the college can get additional support during peak times. For example, September is a busy month for the college, with onboarding of up to 2,700 new students each year. That includes creating ID cards, enabling access, and providing training. Another peak time is examination results day. Having SoftwareOne on hand to manage infrastructure and to ensure system availability means that the college IT team can focus on the student experience, in line with the organisation’s stated aim.

“SoftwareOne instilled a huge confidence,” says Loveday. “They had the intellectual and technical capabilities and capacity to do it, and to do it well and quickly. That was the promise they sold and that was absolutely what they delivered.”