In a world where K-12 school districts focus on cloud-first strategies and one-to-one computing initiatives, are expensive PC labs necessary? When schools are turning to Chromebook and iPad for cheaper hardware and easier management to reduce costs, they find that there are still edge cases that still involve purchasing a PC lab to support a handful of Windows applications. Cameyo eliminates the need for PC labs, while enabling access to Windows applications on any device, directly from the browser.
And for a limited time, Cameyo is offering an end-of-school-year special to help you eliminate your PC labs and free up budget that you can use for other priorities. Read on to learn more about how Cameyo can help you, and see the end of this post for details on this promotion.
Learn how you can save more than $30,000 per year by eliminating a single PC lab.
Windows apps are an obstacle to a complete digital transformation
School districts are under constant pressure to reduce budget, but may not know how. They are stuck between the demands of the teachers, the expense of educational tools, and their meager budgets. How can they do more with less?
Adopting cloud strategies is an easy way to reduce the need for expensive on-premises solutions including large data centers. Most savvy IT administrators have found that many of the solutions they need to provide an excellent education for their students already exist in the cloud and are well on their way to a digital transformation.
However, when supporting Career and Technology Education (CTE) or vocational courses in secondary schools, they inevitably run into the problem of still having to support Windows applications. When the problem comes up, many IT departments fall back on technologies that they know. They set up PC labs and the Windows servers to support them. Or they implement Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which just adds expense and complexity.
Limited time offer: Get 25% off Cameyo to Eliminate Your PC Lab.
But with a 1:1 initiative, the students already have a device in their hands. It doesn’t make sense to provide yet another device and double/triple the costs just for a handful of Windows applications.
What does a PC lab actually cost?
Let’s look at some of the expenses for a PC lab. First, let’s say you need to support 30 students in the class at one time and the class is offered four times a day.
- Hardware: 30 PCs at $1200 per PC = $36,000. Let’s say you refresh these PCs every 4 years, that’s $9000 a year in hardware costs
- Software: For each machine, you need Windows, security software, systems management, etc. Supporting software can average $100 a year or more for each PC.
- Management: The true cost of a PC comes in the management and maintenance costs. 80% of the cost comes after the initial purchase. Gartner says an unmanaged PC costs $5800 a year. PC labs are easier to manage by simply reimaging PCs from a master image, so I’m assuming you could reduce Gartner’s costs to about $1000 a year per PC to manage. That’s at least $30,000 a year in management costs for the entire lab.
- Datacenter: You’ve worked hard to support cloud initiatives, yet somehow you still have an onsite data center. VMware ESX servers, domain controllers, file servers, print server, etc. Supporting this starts at $1500 a month and goes up from there. I have one customer who paid $90,000 for a new SAN appliance.
- Facilities: What are the hard costs of hosting a lab onsite? This includes real estate, electricity, physical security, and maintenance. Plus the opportunity costs of labs taking up space that could be used for other classroom instruction.
If you are bold, here’s a way to figure out the total cost of owning (TCO) a PC in your organization.
Think of all that money you spend to support a PC lab just for that handful of Windows applications.
Eliminate PC labs
Without PC labs, there are ultimately three problems you must solve when trying to support Windows applications for students: how do you install the application on the device that the student is holding; where do you store the data from the app; and how do you make sure a compromised end-user device doesn’t affect your network?
Many turn to VDI and other solutions. However, VDI, even with the promise of cost savings and security, is a huge effort in education. You’ll need a specialist or professional services and you’ll need to beef up your data center with even more servers, software, and time. One school, Homer Central School District, mentioned that using VDI potentially doubled or tripled their PC lab costs.
If you are looking to lower costs, reduce complexity and increase end user productivity, Cameyo for Education is the right solution for you. The service includes:
- A Cloud-native Application Transformation Platform (ATP) that modernizes the secure delivery of Windows desktop applications.
- Access to Windows applications through any HTML5 browser, on any device your users have in hand.
- The hosted solution starts at $10 per named user. Now your expensive lab (see the example above) drops down to $14,000 a year.
- One place to manage your Windows applications, drastically reducing the maintenance costs.
- Seamless integration with G Suite for simplified authentication, permissions, storage, and printing.
- Integration with Office 365 and major cloud storage for safe and secure storage of your documents and data.
- Data privacy and COPPA and FERPA compliance.
For a limited time, we can eliminate your PC lab for just $10,000 per PC lab per year.
This is $4000 off our list price and saves you at least $30,000 per year in on-going costs.
The net of this one-two punch is now you can eliminate PC labs and the backend that goes with it! Check out how Homer Central School District did just that.
Cameyo gets you over the app gap to make your move to the cloud complete. Now all of your applications and backend exist in the cloud. No more software support or hardware maintenance, PC headaches, or onsite data centers. Think of what you can do with the tens of thousands of dollars you are going to save!
To take advantage of this special promotion for education, click here.