The post The Importance of Practice Labs appeared first on Cloud People.
]]>At Cloud People, we have been working with large education institutions now for almost ten years. These include TAFEs, Universities and private RTOs. One challenge that we’ve found that all these institutions have in common, is giving their students access to real IT equipment. This could be for labs, practical assessments or coursework. Students enrolled in IT courses want to roll their sleeves up and get hands-on practice.
The challenge of providing hands-on labs is even greater as education moves from traditional classrooms to an online environment. Online learning is seeing significant growth at the moment. In the past 5 years revenue has grown by on average 14% a year, and the forecast for 2018 is $8.8 billion dollars. However, student engagement levels and completion rates continue to drop with this change.
There are a number of ways that we have seen institutions try to solve this challenge. They either build an in-house solution or, they provide their students access to the software vendors online lab offering. Both of these approaches have their own challenges. In-house solutions are expensive to implement and difficult to manage. The software vendors online lab solutions, while usually provided at no cost to the institution, often suffer from poor performance, are limited in course availability and technical support, but most importantly the institution loses visibility of student activity.
Two years ago at Cloud People, we started to develop a platform to solve those challenges. There were number of key features that it needed to have to really provide value to our customers. The first was that it needed to be cloud hosted and fully supported by our technical staff. This would allow institutions to remain focused on teaching, and not the management of the underlying technology. By hosting it in the cloud, and allowing access from any modern web browser without the need to install additional software, it would provide easy and secure access for both remote and classroom based students. We also considered the needs of course administrators during our two years of development. Our platform would need to provide detailed reporting of student activity to assist in managing engagement levels and completion rates, the creation and publishing of courses needed to intuitive. And lastly, it should become an extension of the institution by custom branding and learning management systme (LMS) integration.
The result of these two years of development is Virtual Labs. Virtual Labs is a cloud hosted IT practice labs platform. It is fully integrated with all major LMSs to provide students seamless access to practical modules of IT courses. Students are given hands-on access to real equipment – servers, desktops, and networking equipment, in their own secure private cloud. They have full administrative access to interact with the equipment and they can carry out their own configurations, or follow lab guides. Course administrators are given access to detailed student metrics that allow tracking student progress and management of engagement levels.
We have seen institutions increase student engagement and completion rates, while reducing the total cost of ownership by implementing Virtual Labs. This has been very encouraging for us. We still consider Virtual Labs to be a young product, and feedback from our customers is invaluable in helping us define the future product roadmap.
We understand that moving online is difficult for traditional education institutions and try to assist in everyway possible, including building and running free Virtual Labs trials for all customers.
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]]>The post Product Update Released appeared first on Cloud People.
]]>Here’s the media release….
Cloud People’s Virtual Labs platform provides TAFEs and Universities with a fast, easy and secure method to create full-featured IT practice labs in the cloud. With the Cloud People platform, organisations can increase student engagement and completion rates, while reducing the total cost of ownership. By using Virtual Labs, students gain unparalleled hands-on access to virtual environments from anywhere.
“This latest release of Virtual Labs has a very strong focus on analytics.” said Jason Kinsella, Director at Cloud People “One of the key messages we received from visitors to our stand at the EduTech conference this year, was that they all struggled to get access to accurate and detailed student activity information.”
He continued to say, “As education moves from classrooms to online environments, student engagement and completion rates significantly decrease. These dropout rates can be as high as 80%. Our latest release of Virtual Labs captures all student activity in real time and provides both online dashboard reporting and scheduled engagement triggers that are completely customisable. By exposing these granular student metrics to course administrators we have already seen significant increases in student engagement and retention rates by our customers. Virtual Labs has always been very strong in providing students with an excellent experience, and now with the introduction of analytics on the platform, the course administrator experience is also greatly enhanced.”
Benefits of the Cloud People Virtual Labs include:
- All aspects of the platform are fully managed to ensure each student has a secure and predictable experience. This allows educators to focus on teaching, and not the management of the underlying technology.
- Virtual Labs can be scaled to match teaching needs and student numbers. Learning organisations need never be restricted by physical lab environments again. Everything is done on-demand, in the cloud.
- Security risks are eliminated by removing the need to grant access to an organisations internal infrastructure from untrusted traffic sources. Every student environment is fully isolated and secure.
- Significant cost savings can be realised compared to physical infrastructure deployments by only paying for consumed resources.
For more information, please visit www.virtuallabs.com.au
The post Product Update Released appeared first on Cloud People.
]]>The post Jason Kinsella – Cloud People Announces Latest Release of Virtual Labs Platform. appeared first on Cloud People.
]]>Cloud People’s Virtual LabsTM platform provides TAFEs and Universities with a fast, easy and secure method to create full-featured IT practice labs in the cloud. With the Cloud People platform, organisations can increase student engagement and completion rates, while reducing the total cost of ownership. By using Virtual LabsTM, students gain unparalleled hands-on access to virtual environments from anywhere.
“This latest release of Virtual Labs has a very strong focus on analytics.” said Jason Kinsella, Director at Cloud People “One of key messages we received from visitors to our stand at the EduTech conference this year, was that they all struggled to get access to accurate detailed student activity information.” He continued to say “As education moves from classrooms to online environments, student engagement and completion rate significantly decrease. These dropout rates can be as high as 80%. This latest version of Virtual Labs captures all student activity on a minute-by-minute basis and provides both online dashboard reporting and scheduled engagement triggers that are completely customisable. By exposing these granular student metrics to course administrators we have already seen significant increases in student engagement and retention rates. Virtual Labs has always been very strong in providing students with an excellent experience, and now with the introduction of analytics on the platform, the course administrator experience is also greatly enhanced.”
Benefits of the Cloud People Virtual LabsTM include:
- All aspects of the platform are fully managed to ensure each student has a secure and predictable experience. This allows educators to focus on teaching, and not the management of the underlying technology.
- Virtual LabsTM can be scaled to match teaching needs and student numbers. Learning organisations need never be restricted by physical lab environments again. Everything is done on-demand, in the cloud.
- Security risks are eliminated by removing the need to grant access to an organisations internal infrastructure from untrusted traffic sources. Every student environment is fully isolated and secure.
- Significant cost savings can be realised compared to physical infrastructure deployments by only paying for consumed resources.
For more information, please visit www.virtuallabs.com.au
About Cloud People
Cloud People has revolutionised how Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) deliver IT courses to their students. This Australian cloud provider established in 2010 provides a fast, easy and secure method to create full-featured virtual lab environments in the cloud. With Cloud People’s Virtual LabsTM platform, organisations can increase student engagement and completion rates, while reducing the total cost of ownership.
@cloudpeopleAU
About Virtual LabsTM
Virtual LabsTM is a cloud based IT learning platform. By using Virtual LabsTM, students gain unparalleled hands-on access to real equipment found in any work place, paired with step-by-step course guides and delivered via a web browser.
For more information, please contact:
Jason Kinsella
Tel: +61 421 733 465
jason(at)cloudpeople(dot)com(dot)au
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]]>The post Cloud People Announces Partnership with Numecent to Bring Application Jukebox™, Numecent’s Cloudpaging Application Virtualisation Technology to Australia. appeared first on Cloud People.
]]>The partnership between Cloud People, a leader in cloud computing and Numecent, the application virtualisation pioneer expands Cloud People’s cloud platform offering to meet its continuing promise of innovative and cost-effective virtualisation solutions that address the challenges facing many businesses today.
For enterprises and educational establishments, there is a constant push to reduce costs: virtual desktops, thin clients, and server-based computing technologies provide many low-cost models with higher levels of control for IT. Often these solutions impact application performance, leading to low user satisfaction and skyrocketing help desk costs. Application Jukebox™ is a powerful alternative for delivering any Windows® application to employees, students and partners.
Application Jukebox™ uses cloudpaging technology to transform native software delivery, deployment and provisioning via the cloud. Advantages include:
- Application Jukebox™ can virtualise 100% of Windows® applications while retaining central control.
- Applications behave exactly as if they are locally installed, making Application Jukebox™ perfect for memory intensive, high-CPU applications.
- Real-time license control capability allows administrators to see exactly how and where licenses are being used, and allocate licenses appropriately.
- Applications can run without a network connection, without the loss of licence control.
“We’ve been involved in implementing application virtualisation solutions for over fifteen years now,” said Jason Kinsella, Director at Cloud People “and Numecent’s Application Jukebox™ technology is the first product we’ve seen that can provide a rich user experience at a cost that allows organisation-wide adoption. The fact that a single virtual server can serve 5000 clients running virtualised applications at native speed has blown us away! When you combine this performance with Application Jukebox’s ability to virtualise 100% of Windows applications, it is well placed as an alternative to Citrix XenApp® and Microsoft App-V® for on-premise deployments. As a cloud-based deployment, it’s got no real competition.”
For more information, please visit http://www.cloudpeople.com.au/application-jukebox
About Cloud People
Cloud People is an Australian cloud computing provider. Their cloud computing platform gives you instant access to virtually unlimited processing power. Complex environments can easily be provisioned and are ready to use within minutes. Host your business in the cloud and save on costs by only paying for what you use.
@cloudpeopleau
For more information, please contact:
Jason Kinsella
Tel: +61 421 733 465
jason(at)cloudpeople(dot)com(dot)au
About Numecent
Numecent is a software company and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider which recently came out of stealth to wide-spread industry acclaim. As a pioneer in the virtualisation space, the company’s recent groundbreaking cloudpaging technology automatically cloudifys any native Windows application to deliver it 20 to 100x faster than digital downloads with no installation required. With partners all over the world, Numecent offers secure, comprehensive, patented solutions for digital software delivery through virtualisation.
The post Cloud People Announces Partnership with Numecent to Bring Application Jukebox™, Numecent’s Cloudpaging Application Virtualisation Technology to Australia. appeared first on Cloud People.
]]>The post SQL Server 2008 / 2012 – Encrypting connections with an SSL Certificate appeared first on Cloud People.
]]>If you are communicating with a SQL server 2008 or SQL Server 2012 over an unencrypted internet link then it is essential that the traffic is secured. The best way to do this is using an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. This blog post provides the instructions necessary to accomplish it. If this is a new setup I would suggest testing that standard connection to your server works before implementing an encrypted connection. Troubleshooting is always more difficult if the basics have not been tested previously.
Pre-requisites
- Ensure that the computer name on your SQL server matches the name you wish to use for client connections. For example if client applications connect to “sqlsrv.cloudpeople.com.au” then the computer name should be sqlsrv. This name will also need to be registered as an A record on your public DNS name servers.
- Allow port 1433 through the firewall (or appropriate port as configured on your SQL server)
Step 1 – Generate a certificate request
The easiest way is to use certutil and an input file.
Edit the subject line of this request.inf file and change the following
E = your email address
CN = the FQDN of your server name
OU = this can be anything you like that reflects your organisation structure (e.g. Internal Infrastructure)
O = your organisation name
L = city
C = country code
Open an elevated command prompt on your server and run this command
- certreq -new request.inf %computername%.req.txt
Step 2 – Request a certificate
Use any public certificate authority to sign your SSL request. Most authorities will require you to upload the req.txt file or copy the contents into their portal. This file can be opened using notepad (or similar). Godaddy is always reasonably priced – google “godaddy discount coupon” prior to purchasing as there is ALWAYS coupons available. More expensive certificate are NOT more secure in terms of encryption. This is controlled by the keylength.
Step 3 – Install certificate and set permissions
Copy the signed certifcate files locally to your SQL server. On your SQL server open a blank MMC console and add the certificates snap-in. Choose “Computer Account”, then Local computer and hit finish. Browse to this location
- Console Root \ Certificates \ Personal \ Certificates
Right click, choose all tasks and then import. Locate the certificate file and import it. Refresh the MMC console (F5) and you should now see the new server certificate. Double click the certificate and you should see “You have a private key that corresponds to this certificate” – if this is not present there has been a problem during generation and the private key has been lost. Do not go any further until this is correct.
Right click on the certificate – choose all tasks and Manage Private Keys… Add the SQL Database Engine Service account user with READ permissions.
Note: If this last step is missed the SQL Service will not start and the failure message in the windows application log will be: Event ID 26014, source MSSQLSERVER, contents
Unable to load user-specified certificate [Cert Hash(sha1) “A3B….913C”]. The server will not accept a connection. You should verify that the certificate is correctly installed. See “Configuring Certificate for Use by SSL” in Books Online.
Step 4 – Configure the SQL server to enforce SSL encryption
Open the SQL Server Configuration Manager (Start – Microsoft SQL Server – Configuration Tools – SQL Server Configuration Manager). Expand the SQL Server Network Configuration and right click on the protocol properties. On the certificate tab configure the Database Engine to use the certificate. If you cannot see the certificate one of the previous steps is not correct. On the Flagstab set the ForceEncryption option to Yes.
The SQL Server must be restarted after changing this setting.
Step 5 – Test
There are a couple of test that can be done. The first is to check the Windows Application log for event ID 26013 with content:
- The certificate [Cert Hash(sha1) “A3B2…7913C”] was successfully loaded for encryption.
The next test should be to setup a Netmon or Wireshark session between the client and the server.
Step 6 – Relax
Sit back and relax in the knowledge that you’ve secured your client server application and are ahead of the other 99% of sysadmins who haven’t read this article.
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