Staffordshire University is striving to build on its existing technical capabilities and position itself as a technology leader in the UK’s higher education sector with a managed cloud services from ANS Group.

The university, which has recently risen 29 places in The Times and The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2018, moved to the Microsoft Azure public cloud last year in order to enhance both its curriculums and corporate strategy using technologies such as machine learning and virtual reality.

After facing substantial increases in cloud costs over the course of this move, the university adopted a managed service from ANS to cut costs and drive efficiencies in order to develop its digital capabilities even further. Since June 2017, the cloud and managed services provider has helped Staffordshire University reduce the cost of running its cloud infrastructure by 25% with the expectation to achieve further, delivering billing insights, allowing budget allocation and driving security and governance alongside this.

Using its cloud infrastructure as a foundation, the university is enhancing its reputation as a leading provider of software engineering, games design, and e-sports related courses, as well as providing a more thorough digital learning experience in its more traditional courses. It is also working to become a truly 24-hour university, so that students can access resources and support whenever and wherever necessary.

By working with ANS, the university is hoping to speed up this process of digitalisation even further. This includes boosting the speed of its student-facing and internal administrative applications and using machine learning software to help to improve student retention rates.

Russ Barnes, ‎Head of Service Management at Staffordshire University, said: “Our ambitious plans for digital transformation require careful, expert-led management and ANS has played an integral part in providing this.

“The team not only understand the scale of our aims, but are already helping us to achieve them. ANS’ managed service has freed up valuable time for our internal IT teams to continually tweak and improve our digital capabilities, so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our students and staff.”

Andy Barrow, CTO at ANS Group, said: “We saw the momentum that Staffordshire University has built over the last year in terms of its digital offering, and we knew that we could provide the public cloud expertise and management to improve this even further.

“Staffordshire University is an incredibly forward-thinking organisation and we’re confident that we can help it to make the best possible use of its cloud investment and achieve complete digital transformation in an agile and cost-efficient way.”