Get your head around the cloud

There’s a huge amount of chatter about cloud computing taking place online, in staffrooms, between friends. It really is a bit of a revolution. But sometimes people miss what it really means for our professional lives and the impact it can have on the ease of collaboration and sharing ideas.

Here are 5 benefits of the cloud:

1. Security

No one can pick the cloud up and run away with it, no one can flood the cloud or burn it…your data is held in a digital fortress. Think of services like online banking. They are super convenient but stringently private and secure. You’re safe in the knowledge that your private details and interactions are only accessible to you.

2. Accessible from anywhere at any time

Society is mobile now more than ever and we like to access our resources and work from wherever we happen to be. The cloud makes this possible. One of the reason we chose for IRIS Connect to live in the cloud is so that teachers can reflect on their lessons from the privacy of their own home, their staffroom or anywhere in between.

3. Collaboration & sharing over distance

The cloud means we are no longer restricted to sharing with those within the same organisation, a whole world has been opened up to us. There’s experience, knowledge and expertise to be discovered and tapped in to in all organisations, the cloud allows us to share ideas with others securely.

4. Reduced storage costs

We no longer need to consider physical storage, space or maintenance for additional school based servers. The cloud provides as much storage as you need, the days of giving each employee/student a data allowance each are over! In a world where large multi-media files are a common place, it’s madness to restrict people’s enthusiasm or creativity due to the server’s capacity.

5. Automatic upgrades

When applications that are hosted in the cloud are developed and updated, users receive fixes, new features and benefits automatically. IRIS Connect for example spend £500,000 a year on research and development, including on the cloud based application.

This means that whenever we have something to make teacher reflection and sharing more effective, our customers receive new features without having to ask or incurring additional costs.

Together, these five benefits of the cloud make life easier and interactions more powerful. These reasons are why IRIS Connect is cloud based. We enable teachers to securely access their lesson observation from anywhere at any time; empowering them to share and collaborate around teaching practice; and provide them with the latest tools to improve reflection and dialogue around teaching and learning.