How Burnley High School Reduced IT Costs by Going Serverless
Delivering a secure, cloud-first environment that reduced infrastructure costs, energy usage and on-site support requirements
Overview
Burnley High School partnered with Novus to remove on-premise servers and transition fully to a cloud-first model built on Microsoft 365. The result was a simpler, more resilient IT environment that reduced costs, lowered energy usage, and significantly cut the need for on-site IT support.
In less than a year, the school eliminated legacy infrastructure, avoided major capital expenditure, and created a modern digital platform that supports staff and students wherever they are.
The Challenge
Burnley High School was operating a traditional on-premise server environment that had become costly and increasingly inefficient to maintain:
The school wanted a future-proof solution that reduced risk, simplified management, and delivered measurable savings without disrupting teaching and learning.
The Approach
Novus worked closely with the IT leadership team at Burnley High School, in collaboration with the Education Partnership Trust, to review the existing IT environment and identify opportunities to reduce costs, complexity, and risk. Rather than replacing ageing on-premise infrastructure with new hardware, a strategic decision was made to move to a cloud-first, serverless model. The focus was on simplifying the environment, consolidating services, and removing the long-term operational burden associated with physical servers.
The approach was carefully planned to ensure continuity for staff and students, with changes introduced in a controlled and phased manner to avoid disruption to teaching and learning.
The Solution Delivered
Working in partnership with Burnley High School and the Education Partnership Trust, Novus delivered a fully serverless IT model built around Microsoft 365 and cloud-managed services. All on-premise servers were removed, along with the associated backup systems, maintenance contracts and licensing overheads. Core services were consolidated into a centrally managed cloud platform, providing improved visibility, security and resilience without reliance on physical infrastructure.
This model allows policies, updates and security controls to be managed centrally, simplifying day-to-day administration and significantly reducing the risk of hardware-related failures.
The Results
The move to a serverless, cloud-first model delivered immediate and measurable benefits. From a financial perspective, Burnley High School removed multiple legacy licensing and backup costs, delivering annual savings across Microsoft OVS, Veeam, offsite backup, and endpoint security. The school also avoided a £15,000 capital investment that would have been required to replace ageing server hosts, while removing ongoing server maintenance costs.
Energy usage reduced by 14% following the removal of on-site servers, lowering utility costs and eliminating the need for server room cooling and power management. Operationally, the IT environment became significantly easier to manage. Support ticket volumes reduced by 50%, and the need for a full-time onsite technician was removed. On-site IT support was reduced from 5 days per week to 2, without any loss of service quality. Troubleshooting is faster, updates are streamlined, and the risk of hardware-related outages has effectively been eliminated.
For staff and students, the transition delivered a more consistent and reliable digital experience. Systems and data are now accessible from any location, whether staff are working onsite or remotely. With no dependency on local servers, downtime caused by infrastructure issues has been removed. As long as internet access is available, lessons continue without disruption. This reliability allows educators to focus on teaching rather than technical issues, while IT teams can spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time supporting users.
Customer Feedback
“Moving to a serverless, cloud-first model has fundamentally changed how we operate. We’ve reduced costs, eliminated the risk of hardware failure, and significantly reduced the on-site support required. The transition was well planned and delivered without disruption, and the environment is now far easier to manage. Staff can now access everything they need from anywhere, without worrying about outages or local server issues. It’s made a real difference to day-to-day teaching and has allowed us to focus on supporting learning rather than maintaining infrastructure“
Talha Mulla, Head of IT, Education Partnership Trust
