Google App's does have central management for its services. Whether it's good enough to meet your needs, you'll just have to try it out. Also it may make sense to only have certain services be internet based, but others local. Print and file services for example seem obvious. For as many users as you have, you would need a pretty hefty pipe to come close to local network performance. What's your internet connection now? Let's say it's 40/10Mbs FiOS. Your network internally is most likely 100Mbs full duplex, and possibly 1Gbs. Would your users like the new speed? If some faculty or students in a media class start downloading large files, is it going to affect teachers opening Office docs? What about peak usage hours? I guess the network performance is what sticks out to me at first. It sounds like the board member just wants to move everything online and has no concept of availability, QoS or just reads mainstream news headlines about Cloud services with no real technical understanding.
-- Mike Gill -----Original Message----- From: techconnect [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 8:44 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: domain controller in the cloud??? We are a private k-8 school and we have a board member who is telling us that we should not buy any new servers to replace the current ones, he says everything is moving to the cloud and so should our stuff(user folders, authenication AD win 2003 R2 and Exchange 2003 is what we're using, they want to move to gmail but there's no central management there I know of,and offsite backups only.) We have about 350-400 students and faculty and they want to be on the bandwagon to the cloud I think without understanding everything about it(I'm not entirely clear either) and was looking for thoughts and opinions or resources. Thanks, Jason ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
