Tamborine Mountain College

Tamborine Mountain College’s Journey to the Cloud: A Story of Resilience, Reliability, and Smart IT Strategy

On Tamborine Mountain in Queensland, weather disruptions are nothing new. But when a powerful storm ripped through the region two years ago during the summer school holidays, Tamborine Mountain College (TMC) was plunged into darkness - two weeks without power, staff left stranded, and an IT plan suddenly in pieces.

For most schools, this would spell disaster. For TMC’s ICT Manager, Olger Diekstra, it became the turning point for the school’s digital transformation.

Future-Focused School

With around 550 students, TMC offers the kind of open, green campus that’s becoming rare. Every student has a Chromebook, staff work with Windows workstations, and Google Workspace underpins teaching and learning. Behind the scenes, their School Management System (SMS), TASS, handles everything from timetables to attendance.

Meet Olger: The Man Leading the Change

At the heart of Tamborine Mountain College’s cloud migration was Olger, the school’s ICT Manager. With a background in network and security engineering and experience across both corporate and education sectors, Olger brought a calm, methodical approach to a high-stakes transition.

When storms hit and plans shifted, Olger worked closely with TASS Technical Services to ensure the school’s systems were ready to go. His leadership helped turn a potential crisis into a smooth migration - keeping the school connected when it mattered most.

“We knew the cloud was the right move. The storm just made the decision urgent,” Olger shared.

For years, TMC ran their SMS on two on-premises Hyper-V servers. This setup worked - until it didn’t.

“One of the servers started having issues,” recalls Olger. “We had two choices: replace the hardware or move to the cloud. Replacing meant more maintenance, more upgrades, and more risk when the power goes out. Cloud hosting meant stability and no hardware headaches.”

When Nature Hits a Curveball

The school had planned their migration for early January. Nature had other plans. On Christmas Day in 2023, A severe storm hit the mountain. According to Scenic Rim Mayor, Greg Christensen, it was the biggest disaster the region has ever faced, labelling the storm as a “tornado”. Significant damage was done to the power network, which resulted in cut power for eight days at the school, and up to two weeks for some staff at home. In the chaos, Carl Meyer from the TASS Technical Services team had already prepared backups and set up the cloud environment.

When power returned, the final migration took place smoothly, despite the disruption.

“If we’d still been on-prem and the server room was hit, it would have taken far longer to restore. With the cloud, we can work from anywhere - even set up in a library or hall with Wi-Fi and keep the school running.”

Business Continuity and Resilience

For the College, moving to the cloud was all about building resilience. In a school environment, even a short downtime can disrupt learning, communication, and operations. Cloud hosting offered the reliability and flexibility they needed to stay connected - no matter what the weather or circumstances threw their way.

And in a school environment, downtime isn’t just inconvenient - it can grind operations to a halt.

“TASS is one of our core systems. If it’s down for an hour, we can cope. If it’s down for a day, it’s a problem. If it’s down for a week, that’s serious. Cloud hosting keeps us connected.”

One moment that underscored the importance of cloud hosting came during the outage itself. TMC’s Business Manager had critical end-of-year financial tasks to complete, but with no power and the school offline, she simply couldn’t work.

“If we’d still been on-prem, there would’ve been no way around it,” Olger said. “Now, with cloud hosting, we know that in future situations like this, she could relocate to a powered location with the internet and continue working. That kind of flexibility is exactly why we made the move.”

The Migration

Technically, the migration was straightforward. The biggest adjustment was moving from Active Directory authentication to Google Workspace Single Sign-On (SSO). Staff needed a little retraining, but once the change bedded in, it became the new normal.

Now, the IT team can focus on strategic improvements rather than maintaining ageing infrastructure. The last pieces of the puzzle - like moving the final file server content into Google Drive — are almost complete.

Lessons Learned for Other Schools Considering the Cloud

• Prepare well in advance - Give your cloud provider early access to your systems so they can prepare backups and configure the new environment.
• Plan for the unexpected - Factor in extra time for migration - storms, power outages, or other surprises can and will happen.
• Focus on continuity - For regional schools or any school facing unpredictable conditions, cloud hosting offers something invaluable: the ability to stay connected and keep operations running smoothly, no matter what. Whether it’s a storm, a power outage, or a sudden shift to remote learning, having core systems in the cloud means staff can access what they need from anywhere, ensuring continuity and confidence in every situation.

Looking Ahead

TMC’s roadmap is clear: move as much as possible to the cloud. With Google Workspace as its core platform and TASS hosted off-site, the school is well-positioned for whatever the future brings - whether that’s another storm, a pandemic, or simply the next stage in their digital transformation.

“Critical systems in the cloud mean we can pick up and run the school from almost anywhere. It’s about reliability and continuity - that’s why we did it.”

The Takeaway

Resilience isn’t about avoiding problems - it’s about being prepared when they come. Would your school be ready if disaster struck tomorrow?

Discover how cloud hosting can transform your school’s resilience with TASS Technical Services.