NTT provides one-stop overall solution for international schools based on Cisco digital network architecture

The tide of digitalization has already affected every aspect of our lives and work. The education industry has also ushered in new development opportunities in the digital era. At the same time, the traditional digital infrastructure of the education industry is also facing many challenges. As a comprehensive service provider focusing on digital transformation, NTT has provided customers with a complete set of solutions from IT planning to implementation and operation and maintenance through in-depth communication with customers and combined with successful industry cases, in conjunction with the Cisco business team. It matches customers' actual business transformation demands, provides a reorganization of the original architecture, and can provide a flexible infrastructure to support the ever-changing needs in the future.

Business Challenges

With the development of school business, the number of campuses and the number of teachers and students in each campus are increasing, the usage habits of teachers and students are changing, and innovative educational methods are emerging. Traditional IT infrastructure faces many challenges.

Mobility requirements

1. Support faculty and students to access office or teaching resources anytime and anywhere through office or personal devices

2. The challenges of the original architecture in terms of the application experience of mobile clients in the campus and the guarantee mechanism and capabilities of the quality of access to video teaching content

3. The existing architecture is difficult to meet the needs of remote teaching under the new normal

Organizational structure virtualization and collaborative teaching and office needs

1. Low-cost and immediate needs for internal training of domestic and foreign faculty and staff

2. Temporary project teams and organizational flattening requirements between different campuses in China

3. Convenience of sharing high-quality educational resources between different campuses and ease of use for business personnel

Data security and access security

1. Challenges in managing network access rights

2. Challenges in synchronizing and associating personnel changes with network permissions

3. Personnel access footprint and permission management of core business data

Daily operation, maintenance and troubleshooting

1. Unified visual management of infrastructure across different campuses

2. Architecture configuration redundancy after long-term operation

3. The fault handling and positioning cycle is long, the response is slow, and there is a lack of effective handling methods

4. A mixed environment of virtualization and conventional environments is difficult to manage

In response to the real business pain points faced by customers, NTT relied on its own experience in IT services to integrate Cisco's excellent business

Solution resources provide customers with the following solutions:

NTT one-stop end-to-end service

NTT integrates its consulting services, project management services, technical support services, managed services, and support services to help customers achieve business outcomes by transitioning their IT businesses from traditional architectures that face many challenges to more scalable and business-resilient infrastructure.

By integrating Cisco DNA-C and the NTT Ticket system, no matter which campus, device, or time the problem occurs, a case can be automatically created and dispatched on the NTT management platform, combined with DNA-C's network big data analysis to quickly resolve the problem.

NTT's managed services platform provides near real-time monitoring reports while managing more than 9,000 IP networks and supporting more than 13 million users worldwide. The platform is designed to meet growing customer needs and enable IT and operations teams to focus on more strategic value-added content, such as improving customer experience, maximizing cost-effectiveness and exploring emerging technologies.

NTT provides clients with consulting services starting from the demand identification stage, with professional demand analysis experts helping clients sort out business pain points and core goals and clarify subsequent business goals.

Intelligent IT infrastructure

Digitally resilient infrastructure

As Cisco's top global gold partner and core strategic partner in mainland China, NTT has designed a resilient basic network architecture based on Cisco's DNA (Digital Network Architecture) for customers, and added security components to provide an overall end-to-end security solution.

The value that Cisco DNA architecture provides to customers:

Unified visual management and operation maintenance

Unified configuration changes and graphical management

Configuration optimization, script editing and fault diagnosis based on big data AI

Flexible and scalable data transmission architecture

RBAC role access control and security policy management based on SDA technology

· Automatic operation and configuration distribution of equipment online

Software-defined access (SD-Access) is a branch of SDN (Software Defined Network) built on the concept of Cisco's fully digital network architecture, which can completely transform the construction and management of the network, making it faster and simpler, and helping to improve business efficiency. By separating network functions from hardware, SD-Access can achieve openness and scalability and reduce operating costs, and on this basis ensure policy consistency, promote faster launch of new business services, and significantly speed up problem resolution.

Help organizations achieve security and meet compliance requirements with an end-to-end segmentation approach that separates user, device, and application traffic without redesigning the network. Improve employee experience by automatically enforcing user access policies and setting the right policies for users or devices accessing any application on the network. Improve operational efficiency with a single, fully converged network fabric that delivers a consistent, uncompromised user experience anywhere.

In this project, NTT provided on-site wired and wireless survey services based on customer needs, providing more accurate data support for customers to more accurately determine the selection and quantity of related equipment and optimize project budgets. In addition, NTT selected Cisco's DNAC+WLC+AP solution combination for customers, achieving the following design results:

High-quality wireless coverage, selection and budget optimization based on NTT's precise survey

Provide visual management and real-time optimization of wireless network quality based on DNAC

Unified management of wireless networks and fault diagnosis across campuses

· Plug-and-play automatic deployment and unified policy distribution for new equipment expansion

Hyper-converged computing and storage integrated platform and complete data protection

The customer's original environment used a large number of physical machine systems and virtual machine systems, which resulted in data corruption and unstable application operation due to equipment hardware stability issues, and also faced the demand to increase equipment utilization to reduce the total cost of ownership. At the same time, the mixed application environment also increased the technical requirements and challenges for operation and maintenance personnel.

NTT, together with Cisco and Veeam, provides customers with data computing and storage solutions based on Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged architecture, and helps customers develop detailed migration plans through professional services to achieve a smooth migration transition of customer-related applications and data.

Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged systems use a purpose-built, end-to-end software-defined infrastructure. Cisco HyperFlex systems combine software-defined capabilities: software-defined computing through Cisco UCS servers and software-defined storage through HyperFlex HX Data Platform software. With a choice of hybrid or all-flash storage configurations and management tools, Cisco HyperFlex systems offer pre-integrated clusters that are up and running in an hour or less and can scale resources independently to best meet application resource needs.

The platform's architecture and software-defined storage approach provide you with a purpose-built, high-performance distributed file system that offers a range of enterprise-class data management services. By redefining distributed storage technology, the data platform provides you with a hyperconverged infrastructure that enables an adaptive IT infrastructure.

Intelligent digital collaborative teaching

Audio and video fusion integrated platform solution

The solution provides schools with a complete set of collaborative tools, including high-quality voice, video, messaging, instant messaging and online status, meetings, video conferencing, mobile features, etc. These tools enable schools to quickly improve teaching efficiency.

The design of unified communications not only considers the functions on the terminal, but also allows teachers to communicate collaboratively at any time, in any place, and using any terminal. At the same time, it provides users with the same experience on multiple terminals. The solution design not only considers the deployment of single-point devices and the realization of functions, but also considers how to network and how to provide the same collaborative communication experience for teachers and students in multiple schools.

NTT has integrated traditional voice communications and video conferencing systems by deploying Cisco's unified communications platform CUCM for customers in a virtual machine environment, helping customers connect to various campuses and video classrooms in China at any time on demand, maximizing the conversion rate of excellent teachers within the school. At the same time, it can communicate more effectively with the headquarters in Singapore and the UK in a more timely manner, especially in the application of internal teaching seminars and sharing. As customers explore new teaching models, there are plans to cooperate with third-party institutions in remote teaching based on an open unified communications platform in the future. NTT will also provide customers with continuous infrastructure platform integration for this part.

Project Outcomes

Through the new digital platform, the school has reduced IT software and hardware investment costs and operating costs, and improved teaching flexibility. Operation and maintenance costs have been reduced by 61% compared to before, and troubleshooting time has been reduced by 80%, especially for wireless user onboarding issues, which has been reduced from several hours to a few minutes now.

Through NTT's management services, school IT personnel can free their main energy from daily operation and maintenance work and focus on business innovation.

NTT Dalian Delivery Center

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About NTT Ltd.

NTT Ltd. is a leading global technology services company that works with organizations around the world to shape and achieve outcomes through intelligent technology solutions. To us, intelligent means data-driven, connected, digital and secure. As a global ICT provider, we have more than 40,000 employees in a diverse and dynamic workplace in 57 countries around the world, trade with 73 countries and provide services to more than 200 countries and regions, working together to create a connected future.

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