Block’s approach to University network deployments

Delivering reliable network infrastructure to UK universities, without disrupting teaching.

When you choose to partner with Block on a network transformation project, you’re opting for a practical, non-disruptive approach. One that considers technology, the physical university estate, and your digital team.

We operate in education but our roots are in healthcare, which means we know how to deploy with minimal downtime.

For you, this translates to deploying your wireless, wired LAN, WAN, SD-WAN, or data centre infrastructure, without stopping teaching, research, or essential services.

Zero Trust one pager download

Share this with your team?

Download your free factsheet here.

Access now

The process: minimising student disruption

When you begin your project with us, we’ll work together to define requirements, establish processes, and work out ways to make deployment as disruption-free as possible.

Magnifying glass icon

1. Discover
Every project starts by understanding your university’s unique estate. We usually do this through stakeholder workshops, network assessments, audits, and site surveys.

2. Design
Our specialists will develop a design with your technical stakeholders. We’ll consider your requirements as well as the realities of deploying on your busy campus.

3. Pre-deployment
We’ll agree project phases, risks, building access, testing criteria, and change communication. Equipment can also be staged and configured off-site to reduce conducting disruptive work on campus.

4. Deployment
Block engineers can work day or night, and within holiday windows to avoid disrupting teaching. Deployment is planned around academic calendars, critical services, and your availability.

Your team

We assemble your Block team according to project requirements.

You can expect:

  • Lead architects and architects who define the technical direction and develop the design.
  • Consultants who assess the environment and translate requirements into recommendations.
  • A project manager who coordinates the plan, resources, risks, and communication.
  • Engineers who stage, configure, install, migrate, and test the infrastructure.
  • Success and service specialists who support handover and ongoing operation.
  • Software engineers who support automation and integration where required.

Everyone will work alongside your digital and estates teams, as well as collaborate with other suppliers. We’ll also
agree responsibilities, approval processes, and escalation routes upfront, so everyone’s always on the same page

East Asian man in blue shirt smiling at the camera

Managed and co-managed services

You have two options after your new network deployment with Block.

1. We hand your new network back to your digital team so you can manage operations in-house.

We’ll do a full hand over and get your team up to speed on how to get the most out of your investment.

2. We can continue working alongside your team through our managed (or co-managed) services.

Our specialists provide incident and major incident management, event, problem, and change management, asset and configuration management, vendor support, lifecycle management, monitoring, backup, patching and continual service improvement.

Man looking at rack cabinet

Did you know?

Block currently manages 500,000 assets in some of the most critical environments. We also have a dedicated AI and automation team who develop tooling that gets you reliable results and better network visibility faster.

 

 

More like this

Back to Hub

Test your campus readiness

Is Zero Trust possible in the public sector? | Cisco Security

Patching and perimeters: Are these outdated network security defences for universities?