From catastrophic failure — 7 passing checks out of 32 — to a perfect score. Every domain rebuilt. In under 20 months.
An independent audit of 32 pass/fail IT governance checkpoints was commissioned in 2023. The score was tracked, reported, and verified at every stage — with no rounding, no cherry-picking, and no premature victory claims.
Every domain of the school's IT platform was rebuilt from the ground up. These are the measurable outcomes.
22% compliance. No IT leadership. No SLA. No job descriptions. No inventory. Support calls routed to one technician's personal mobile number.
100% — perfect score. All 7 domains fully compliant in under 20 months. ITIL-structured department, monthly governance reports to Managing Director, full audit trail.
Per user at peak. 30 Mbps shared across 1,200 people. Wi-Fi effectively non-existent — standalone APs, one device at a time. Failover at 512 Kbps.
Dedicated, confirmed at 391/388 Mbps. 75 Ruckus mesh APs — every classroom, lab, outdoor zone. 5,000 concurrent users tested at the annual Christmas Bazaar without a single incident. 100% uptime during school hours maintained for 2+ years.
Ransomware server takeovers — every day. The existing firewall was actively enabling them, while consuming 50% of all purchased bandwidth as processing overhead. No 2FA. No identity controls.
Ransomware eliminated on the day of firewall replacement. Zero incidents since. 2FA deployed across 2,463 Microsoft 365 accounts. Content filtering and per-user bandwidth controls across all SSIDs.
Market-priced estimate for a full campus iPad deployment. Considered unaffordable. Zero managed Apple devices on campus.
338 fully managed devices — iPads, Apple Pencils, Keyboard cases, Apple TVs — all phases combined. Grade 8 expansion (88 devices) funded entirely by parents at zero cost to the school. Support tickets since launch: ZERO across 18+ months.
Colour printing cost. Monochrome at EGP 23/copy. 36 mixed-model printers requiring a wide consumables inventory — no volume leverage, no standardisation.
Annual recurring saving. Colour reduced to EGP 13/copy (−76%). Monochrome to EGP 5/copy (−78%). Fleet rationalised to 2 standardised models. Requires no further intervention — savings compound every year.
Annual HDMI cable replacement cost from degradation and vandalism. Amplifier failures routine. No wireless projection across any classroom.
One-time investment. HDMI costs eliminated permanently — payback under 2 months. 100% wireless projection campus-wide. AirPlay added for Apple users. Amplifier and audio failures: resolved at zero hardware cost.
No ticketing. No SLA. No accountability. Constant firefighting culture. When the MIS Manager eventually departed, the operation would have collapsed.
322 tickets/month average. 4-minute classroom resolution time. 99.7% SLA compliance over the most recent 6-month reporting period. When the MIS Manager departed in Sept 2025 — zero service degradation. Monthly reports delivered to school leadership without exception.
Zero in-house digital products. Arabic exam portal controlled by a departed contractor — school paying $600/year for a system it funded but didn't own. No library management system in 150 years.
Arabic exam portal fully rebuilt on school-owned infrastructure in 12 days — $600/year vendor cost eliminated permanently. Activities portal built from scratch, commended in writing by a school board member to the Managing Director. First digitalised library in the school's 150-year history. All maintained in-house at near-zero recurring cost.
At every major hardware decision, HDE sourced and negotiated independently — with no commercial interest in the outcome. The savings below are documented against real proposals and invoices.
Mainstream Cisco/Fortigate HA pair for 1,200 users. HDE sourced a Netgate 1537 HA pair — same resilience, zero per-user licensing fees, zero bandwidth overhead. Ransomware ceased on the day of replacement.
Same 8× Cisco Catalyst C9300L specification. Sourced through the school's own established European supply chain — but negotiated by HDE. Across all switch procurement rounds: 13 enterprise switches delivered for EUR 44,824 total, against EUR 65,970 for 8 alone.
338 fully managed devices — iPads, Apple Pencils, Keyboard cases, Apple TVs — across all deployment phases. Delivered through duty exemption, Apple Education pricing, and international sourcing. Grade 8 expansion funded entirely by parents: zero school cost.
Really happy the portal reached this level of professionalism. Both desktop and mobile versions flow well, are very user-friendly and look nice and catchy. A BIG THANK YOU to the entire team who worked on this project. Wonderful!
This engagement was not a staffing contract or a break-fix retainer. Help Desk Egypt provided the strategic IT leadership layer the institution was missing — embedded directly alongside the existing team, reporting to school management, accountable for outcomes.
The contracted scope was deliberately lean: 20 hours per week. The model was designed to build sustainable internal capability, not create dependency. When a senior team member departed in 2025, the operation continued without disruption. That resilience is the measure of the work.
If your school is operating without a documented IT strategy, a governance framework, or a path to measurable improvement — this is what a structured engagement looks like.
Most school IT environments fail quietly — no audit, no baseline, no accountability. The first step is knowing where you actually stand. We can tell you.