Case Studies

Brightpath Academy's Migration to Azure: Secure Cloud for 200 Learners

By Brightpath Academy

The Challenge

Brightpath Academy, a private school with 200 learners and 30 staff, was running its student information systems, file storage, and administrative applications on aging on-premises servers approaching end-of-life. Replacing the hardware was projected to cost over R180,000 — budget the school simply didn’t have.

The school also faced increasing pressure to demonstrate improved cybersecurity posture following ransomware incidents at neighbouring institutions.

The Approach

365 IT Consultants proposed a phased Azure migration strategy that spread costs over the term and prioritised the most critical workloads first.

Phase 1: Identity and Security Foundation (Weeks 1–2)

  • Deployed Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) as the authoritative identity provider for all staff.
  • Enabled multi-factor authentication for all staff accounts.
  • Configured Conditional Access policies to enforce compliant device requirements.

Phase 2: File and Collaboration Workloads (Weeks 3–5)

  • Migrated 800GB of shared drives to SharePoint Online and OneDrive.
  • Deployed Microsoft Teams for departmental communication, replacing a legacy shared-mailbox approach.

Phase 3: Application Server (Weeks 6–8)

  • Lift-and-shifted the student information system to an Azure Virtual Machine.
  • Decommissioned 2 physical servers, eliminating the hardware refresh requirement.

Phase 4: Backup and DR (Weeks 9–10)

  • Implemented Azure Backup for the VM with a 30-day retention policy.
  • Documented and tested a disaster recovery runbook.

The Outcome

  • R0 capital hardware spend — the on-premises servers were decommissioned without replacement.
  • 99.9% application availability in the first term post-migration (Azure SLA).
  • Cybersecurity posture improved — MFA deployed across 100% of staff accounts; zero security incidents since migration.
  • Annual IT infrastructure cost reduced by 28% compared to the projected hardware refresh pathway.

Technologies Used

  • Microsoft Azure (Virtual Machines, Azure Backup, Azure Networking)
  • Microsoft Entra ID with Conditional Access
  • Microsoft 365 Education (Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive)
  • Azure Backup

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