Moving from local to cloud
Learn about how Firefly's cloud services can support your school.
Firefly Cloud is built to deliver the very best experience to your end-users with the help of world-class infrastructure powered by Amazon’s AWS. This globally-reaching network boasts carrier-grade connectivity, ensuring that Firefly’s speed is never limited by anything beyond a client’s own internet connection. Amazon’s powerful data centres (which also host major platforms such as Netflix, Adobe, Spotify, Dow Jones, Citrix and many more) combined with a specially tailored implementation of Firefly tailored for the cloud, will ensure that from the moment you migrate, you benefit from a highly resilient and physically secure infrastructure far beyond anything achievable on-premise. This robust architecture offers you the ultimate reassurance that your data is safe and easily accessible from anywhere.
Further to industry-leading hardware and physical security, you will also benefit from automatic backups of your database every 5 minutes, automatic and silent Firefly updates (which will not log users out or disrupt work, unlike with on-premise installations), a distributed architecture for load-balancing traffic across self-healing servers, and much more. All of this is monitored full time by our teams in both London and Sydney, and we are proud to have maintained an uptime of 99.9% or greater each year since we first launched our cloud product in 2013.
The process
We offer a fully managed cloud migration process which is straightforward and handled by our experienced and friendly Professional Services team. The process takes up to 5 working days to complete and we are on hand to guide you through every step from start to finish. We will complete the migration on or before the planned date, having carried out a range of tests before you complete your own User Acceptance Testing prior to releasing for your userbase. Access to your data stored on Firefly is available throughout the migration and no complete downtime is necessary.
What will happen after May 1st 2020?
As of May 1st 2020, any Firefly installation which is not hosted in the Firefly Cloud will enter “maintenance mode”. This means that you can still contact our help desk for general assistance or to move to the cloud, however, we will not be issuing regular software updates. Maintenance mode for local schools will be available between May 2020 and September 2020. After September 2020, any schools that remain locally hosted will be unsupported without updates, security patches or fixes. We strongly recommend, therefore, that you work with us to plan your cloud migration to ensure that your school is ready to deploy a fully supported Firefly Cloud site before May 2020.
To find out more and receive answers to any questions you may have, please contact your Customer Success Manager or drop an email to clientexperience@fireflylearning.com