UK schools give system supplier Bromcom an F for Azure uptime
- Reference: 1757485806
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/09/10/bromcom_fail/
- Source link:
Although Bromcom's [1]status page reports issues with the company's services, it still claims "99 percent uptime" over the last 90 days. However, considering that a large chunk of that was vacation time for UK schools, it's really only the last week or so that will be of the most concern.
During that time, the wheels really seemed to come off. Even the status page says: "Some Resources are Severe Degradation" [sic].
[2]
Away from the status page, Bromcom has [3]kept users updated on its troubles. On August 31, Bromcom increased resources on its cloud system "to help make the return to school run as smoothly as possible."
[4]
[5]
However, by September 4, something had gone wrong. According to Bromcom, "one of our servers developed a serious fault... This has caused some ongoing instability when users are connected to that server."
Over the next few days, the system was either very slow or totally down despite multiple restarts. On the morning of September 9, five days after the problems began, the company reported: "The system performance appears to have improved."
[6]Ubuntu users left waiting after Canonical's servers take weekend off
[7]Matrix.org homeserver grinds to a halt after RAID meltdown
[8]Alibaba Cloud reveals its uptime and efficiency secrets developed by in-house network boffins
[9]Not again! Microsoft blames config tweak for 365 outage in parts of North America
That's a great comfort to affected schools, we're sure. One source who wished to remain anonymous told us: "The impact it is having means schools are finding it difficult to check what students they have in the building, complete fire registers, or even get parental contact details. Tasks that should take a minute are taking hours as you have to keep refreshing the page until you get connected to an instance that works."
The Register asked Bromcom to comment, but the company has not responded. The UK's Department for Education [10]calls an MIS "a critical part of a school's digital infrastructure," but, other than a document on how a school might select an MIS, it does not have much in the way of regulatory guidance.
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"Many suppliers," the department's document notes, "will not guarantee that their systems will function and be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
A spokesperson for the department told The Register : "Educational settings in England are responsible for maintaining their IT systems, so there is no specific guidance or regulation around it."
Based on its performance so far in the new school year, Bromcom's Azure-based service has indeed not been available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://community.bromcomcloud.com/bromcom-status-odo9p1c9
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aMFMOUu3TLTJ2bCdtmH6mwAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://community.bromcomcloud.com/announcements/post/performance-issues-in-progress-Ah7hUHmlIQPCgo1
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aMFMOUu3TLTJ2bCdtmH6mwAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aMFMOUu3TLTJ2bCdtmH6mwAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/08/canonical_server_outage/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/03/matrixorg_raid_failure/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/02/alibaba_cloud_reveals_its_uptime/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/microsoft_365_outage/
[10] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/choosing-a-school-management-information-system-mis/commercial-considerations-when-choosing-a-management-information-system-mis
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aMFMOUu3TLTJ2bCdtmH6mwAAAFQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"Many suppliers," the department's document notes, "will not guarantee that their systems will function and be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
So reading that statement, they (suppliers) don’t expect the software to work properly or be available?
Surely this is the first thing you would be looking at when purchasing such a system….but then reading what it does
Who is on site - any door access system can tell you if it can’t then it isn’t fit for purpose.
How to contact parents - an access database, spreadsheet or card index file would do the job
Attendance registers - paper works quite well for this.
You would have hoped that the education department would have produced some guidelines and have a list of suppliers that have been verified, oh sorry this is the same idiots behind the online safety act and the “markets will find a solution” mantra..
Paper works quite well
Indeed it seems more reliable than the alternative.
Integrated MIS vs Disparate systems
As someone who has weathered the slings and arrows of school targeted MIS systems and, in other lives, non-integrated entry/registration/contact systems, I know which I would prefer to use for anything bigger than a 3 class primary school with 9 children per year!
SIMS is the most famous of all completely rubbish School MIS systems - a victim of successive take-overs and consequent loss of touch with their customers.
As a database it was once competent but has suffered from function creep and a lack of will to actually spend nmoney on redevleopment.
SIMS Next Gen is trying to get where its competitors already are and I, personally, hope SIMS dies a death becasue it is starting so far behind.
Sadly as SIMS is embedded in the functions of many LAs and Schools, UK wide, it may twitch and jerk in its inevitable death throes but everyone has had enough of it. The lastest (last year-ish) "Oh you can only use SIMS if ESS host it. BTW you have 6 months to decide and if you go with us, hosting it will be 3 year contract" stunt by ESS/ParentPay has reduced managability and reliability massively over the LA hosted on-WAN servers. Some lucky LAs had the nerve to call ESS/ParentPay's bluff and jumped ship. Ours didn't.
The other school MIS systems - Arbor, BromCom etc. have taken the good bits of SIMS and webified it, hopefully sorting out the heinous back end. Sadly as they are (all?) cloud based, they suffer from 'it will never break' syndrome and fall mightily when it does.
/icon cos its skools innit bruv?
I think to imply Azure is at fault is a little bit disingenuous when it seems to be more their practices. Even if Azure wobbles (or AWS or GCP) there are plenty of design patterns to see you're not reliant on one particular resource or AZ or region, and something of this scale should be doing that. Disclaimer - I work for Microsoft and these are my opinions
Yeah that statement of theirs stinks of a poorly designed and cobbled together system with no scaling or even load balancing.
Don't know about Bromcom in particular but I find that almost all school MIS "online" versions are basically cobbled-together things run on Windows servers because they still just work like a layer over the original program, which is usually a nightmare of .NET Framework etc. that's actively maintained.
When they take them into the cloud, rather than actually making a full redesign in a web-based language, they just run the same program on the same servers and slap a web interface over it, often served not by any sensible web language but by the original program itself, just hidden away from you, or a mess of DLLs in IIS.
Almost all of them are just proprietary software running on a SQL database (almost exclusively Microsoft, because their developers never know anything else).
All that happens when they "cloud" them is they run a bunch of Windows servers set up in the same say as their prior on-prem servers used to have to be deployed, and often lump a few dozen client's data onto each machine.
If it was a true "web" MIS, you would be able to just deploy a clean server, fold it into a web cluster, it would connect to the clustered database with all their clients data, and it would just work again. The reason they have problems is that that's not how any school MIS I've ever encountered is actually developed on the back end.
The one I used previously to my current school actually had everything reliant on a "report server" (not school reports, but SQL reports) and what happened when you requested certain pages on the web interface was it ran off to the report server (which could be hosted in-house!) and had that run SQL queries, convert the information, and pass it back to the interface (local executable or web). The report server was NOTORIOUSLY unreliable and would jam up all the time because what it was doing was creating an Office document, filling it out with the information from SQL, and then returning a PDF etc. automatically. If there were Office updates, or any new things in Office that caused dialogs to pop up, or an error in the document... it would just hang the service with half-a-dozen instances of Word, etc. running in the background waiting for a response (as a user that you could not log-in interactively as). Changing the default printer to anything other than a Print-to-PDF printer would cause the report server to stop working. Because that's how it made PDFs... automating print to a virtual printer on the same server from Word.
The solution was kill the report server, kill all the Office apps on the server, restart the report server.
It was that common that I made a script to do it for myself, called it "Fix
They "went cloud" and forced everyone off on-prem instances eventually. And I discovered, through experimentation and talking to their tech support, that they basically just had the same report servers running in their datacentre and watchdog scripts to kill and restart them if they fell over or failed. Everything was just written in C# still. And that was after YEARS of redesign and upheaval in the migration to cloud.
Well said sirrah!
Chapeau - its all a complete nightmare here in schools.
ESS/ParentPay/SIMS (my current bête noire) does the hosting thing exactly as you say; Just a VM running the applications on a AWS/Azure/whatever service - exactly the same as would have been running on a server in the LA DC with none of the advantages of local people being able to fix stuff when it (often) breaks.
They also have security theatre on the front end that includes sending you an email saying "We have detected a logon from a new browser or device at 01-09-2025. For privacy reasons we do not store the specific details of the device and this may have changed because your browser has updated, used a new device or logged in from a different network. If this was you then you do not need to take any further action." so expect you to decide if it was you based on 0 information other than the date!
It's all a bit shit and a great example of why vendor lock-in is bad. Unfortunately change is difficult becasue of the immense quantity of badly structured data in SIMS needing transport to a.n.other back end. Some people have made the leap and have found that whilst the grass may only be slightly greener, that little makes all the difference.
Re: Well said sirrah!
I'm just waiting for the first major school MIS compromise because I'm pretty sure that once hackers are into that, they would have all kinds of easy access to just about every school hosted with them, and I doubt they have adequate measures in place to guard against such. Given what I've seen of their slapdash development practices, I can't believe for a second that their security practices are any better.
I once had a main developer for the MIS in question above talking to one of my users to resolve a problem, and over the phone they literally got an ordinary user to go into a panel on the MIS software where you could enter RAW SQL!!!! And from there he deleted tables and rejigged data to fit new schemas and formats by TELLING THEM WHAT TO TYPE. A user. In an elevated SQL prompt in their software that accepted arbitrary SQL (including DROP TABLE). Typing in SQL. By hand. To adjust the main database to a new schema.
I nearly hit the roof when I witnessed that.
Not even a BEGIN TRANSACTION either or any other safeguards... just straight DROP TABLE... on a live database.
On the basis of how crap Bromcom's parent access interface is, this comes as no surprise. And who the hell makes significant changes to a school MIS just before the start of term?
>>who the hell makes significant changes to a school MIS just before the start of term?
ESS/ParentPay? No wait, they make a basically unusable MIS in the first place so you don't notice when stuff breaks becasue of them, you just blame the crapware.
"And who the hell makes significant changes to a school MIS just before the start of term?"
ALL OF THEM.
ALL THE TIME.
EVERY YEAR.
Yours,
A school IT manager of 25+ years.
The 'need' for a computer register
>> to track student attendance
Meanwhile a book with a list of names and ticks on the relevant dates works 100% of the time.
Having had the "pleasure" of dealing with Bromcom on the parent side, this seems about right. We had failure to provide cookie notices, privacy policies and T&Cs (which they try and bind you to without being able to read) on both student and parent portals, with no responses to try and get that information from them.
Their MIS has AI integration, so every pupils data is fair game apparently. Maybe they could ask copilot to restore their azure instance.