How A School Modernized Its Infrastructure & Learning Platform with Google Cloud

It’s not every day that an elementary school on the outskirts of a capital city decides to move all its workloads to the cloud. Cloud Kinetics has been privileged to be chosen to help in this unique educational endeavour at a unique school in Indonesia.

Unique because the institution, Marie Joseph School was only founded on January 10, 2004. In just two years, its popularity and prestige rose so rapidly that junior and senior high school wings had to be also started.

“Our motto is to enable students to be intelligent, creative, independent, and virtuous,” Ms Carestha Widjaja, Chairwoman of Yayasan Amal dan Kurban Jakarta, said. “With the spread of Covid-19, the school had to rapidly evolve to adapt to new learning methods by innovative use of technology.”

The pandemic forced classes to go online, and thousands of students had to log in to their school system every day. Therefore, the school needed not only fast response times but also a layer of security and high reliability. They also required services to be scaled on demand to adapt to the rapidly rising demand from students.

We needed a secure, reliable, fail-proof platform. We opted for GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and the Moodle LMS (Learning Management System), which is widely used in universities and schools. Moodle is modular and can be adapted to any type of online learning. We decided to partner with Cloud Kinetics to help us manage the migration. Principal, Marie Joseph School

CK set up a secure, high-speed infrastructure on GCP and optimized the school’s apps, workloads and processes on the cloud. The critical issue was to keep everything secure and on budget. CK provided managed services and support with a robust WAF (Web Application Firewall), with added security and identity-based access. All traffic between public-facing web apps and private networks were securely monitored and managed according to set policies. This helped the school achieve 99.9% uptime.

We built a high-speed, powerful infrastructure that could scale up to meet the rising demands while keeping costs under control. We helped host their applications, their database files, workloads, tools, web content, backups, and static files. Ted A, Chief Revenue Officer, Cloud Kinetics

Why Moodle?

Moodle is an open-source LMS ideal for blended learning, distance education, flipped classrooms and other e-learning projects in schools, universities, workplaces, etc. It has customizable management features and can be used to create private websites with online courses for educators to achieve learning goals.

Why GCP?

Because GCP is a suite of cloud services that run on the same platform that Google uses internally for products such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. GCP provides a set of management tools and modular cloud services, including computing, storage, analytics and machine learning.

The trend toward data localization is also drawing the tech titans to the world’s fourth most populous country. “Indonesia is full of opportunity,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, said during Google Cloud’s virtual launching ceremony in Jakarta on June 24, 2021. “It is one of the most creative, dynamic, entrepreneurial countries in Southeast Asia with more than 150 million Internet users.”

Indonesia’s education system is the fourth largest globally, with more than 50 million students, 3 million teachers and 300,000 schools. Primary to high school level education is compulsory. Primary and middle school education is complimentary, while students are charged a small fee in high school. In 2018, for example, the enrolment rate for primary school was 93.5%, and for middle school, it was 78.84%.

Tags: Automation Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Migration Cloud Operations (CloudOps) Education Google Cloud