For as long as school budgets have existed, wisely spending funds has been an issue. One of the challenges schools face is keeping pace with technology. Enter cloud technologies – which bring the promise of cost-efficient tools for managing school IT environments.
Today, most schools have mandates in place to move everything to the cloud, giving all of their students access to applications and resources anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Many are far along the path or at least have embarked upon their cloud strategy. Regardless of where your institution is in its cloud journey, the reality is that there’s likely one big piece of this migration that has proven too difficult and too costly to migrate.
The migration of your legacy Windows applications to the cloud.
While many of today’s applications are already web-enabled, inherently providing a relatively painless way to move to the cloud, that doesn’t account for the years and years of legacy applications that educational institutions have invested in. These legacy apps require installation on a Windows-based desktop in order to operate. You’ll find these legacy Windows apps in every learning institution, from K-12, to learning centers, to Special Education programs, and even in Higher Education.
But these applications were never designed to be accessible online, so – traditionally – the only options available to educational IT are:
- Retooling/rebuilding legacy apps.
- Application virtualization.
- Extending existing lab environments.
In the retooling scenario, institutions typically pay software specialists to completely rewrite their legacy apps to make them cloud friendly. This can be massively expensive, and can take many months.
While application virtualization meets some of the goals associated with online accessibility, it still requires local execution of the application on a Windows machine. This means that Windows machines still need to be maintained and even updated, often a costly proposition, especially as scale is required. Budget ends up being spent investing in legacy technology when in fact, the objective is to modernize.
Most schools and education institutions want to make the move to Chromebooks, to take advantage of the lower-cost hardware, ease of use, flexibility, and security that the they offer. In other parts of the world, while different mobile books may be more popular, all share the desire to offer economical options to students who live in a mobile world. But because of the dependence on legacy applications, many continue to spend budget to maintain their old labs while also building new lab environments for their cloud-based Chromebooks and their newer apps.
Ultimately, this leads to an important conversation about what it means to truly modernize your legacy applications. For most, application modernization simply means “get it online.” But that simply isn’t enough. “Getting it online” has meant application virtualization for many, requiring deep investments in infrastructure and virtualization expertise. And those costs continue to mount because of ongoing maintenance, and the net new costs that are incurred when it comes time to grow and scale.
So what SHOULD application modernization look like? Is there a better way?
No App Left Behind
Your institution simply cannot afford to abandon the significant investments you’ve made in applications and systems throughout the years. Especially since those legacy applications – though inflexible – still provide immense value to your students.
Luckily, there is another option to ensure your investment is protected, that you don’t leave it behind, while minimizing ongoing maintenance time and cost. At Cameyo, we’ve developed a simple, scalable, and secure approach for you to migrate all of your legacy Windows applicati
ons – so they run natively in the cloud. Here’s how we make application modernization work for you:
- Simple – Cameyo cuts application migration time and cost by publishing your legacy apps to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) – making them accessible to any modern browser (including mobile), with absolutely zero app development required on your end.
- Scalable – One Cameyo server handles dozens of concurrent sessions without requiring any maintenance or specialized skills from your IT staff.
- Secure – We separate your applications from the various devices users utilize to access the apps, protecting your network and data from any compromised end user devices.
So what does this mean for your institution?
Simply put, it means that Cameyo can help you provide any student access to any application on any device, any time. Your students are empowered to work the way they’re used to working, without you having to worry about losing out on all your previous app investments.
But Cameyo doesn’t just give you the ability to improve the learning experiences of your students – it also gives you freedom. Freedom for you to finally make the full leap to a Google environment, without being saddled with the cost of ongoing legacy apps maintenance. Freedom to embrace the most cost-effective and flexible hardware for your school. Freedom to get away from the stranglehold of Active Directory. And most importantly – the freedom of knowing that you have delivered a simpler, more scalable solution that provides greater security than ever before.
The best part is, this freedom isn’t hard to obtain. Try it yourself today with a free, no obligation trial.