EDTECH: Where is your school district in the transition to the cloud?
PENNER: If we are talking program, almost 100% have been migrated to the cloud. If we’re talking about business applications, probably 50%. Five years ago, we had 130 to 140 servers. We only have 50 Windows servers left and are working with Microsoft to move 40 of them to Azure. Once these are moved, we will no longer have on-premises application servers. We will have five to ten servers on site for networking equipment, print servers, electronic door locks and security cameras.
DICKSON: It’s about 90%. We have moved email to Microsoft 365. Most of our resources are in Azure, when it comes to infrastructure as a service. We moved financial services and PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud. We also migrated our building management, student information, and library circulation systems to the cloud.
RELATED: Why K-12 schools are modernizing with hyperconverged infrastructure.
ARZATE: Probably 30%. We are migrating a library application, so it will probably be 40% in the spring. We started five years ago when we migrated our web presence to Amazon Web Services. We use Azure Stack HCI for hyperconverged infrastructure, so we connect on-premises infrastructure to Azure services. We are a Microsoft store, so we use Microsoft 365 and Entra ID. We use the cloud for disaster recovery. We also test data models and use a cloud-based data warehouse.
BRINKMAN: Around 90% of our business applications have been migrated to the cloud. We use AWS and some Azure. Enterprise Resource Planning is our last major core application that will be moved to Oracle Cloud, so we will soon be at 95%. We will still have a small presence on site, mainly for the network, but there are also a few smaller applications that control refrigerators, air conditioners and security.
CROSS: We have certainly seen a slight increase with independent schools move to the cloud in recent years. I can tell you anecdotally that more and more schools have realized that cloud providers can provide far more robust security, access and availability than they are able to achieve with their IT staff on site.
EDTECH: What are the main benefits you have seen from the cloud?
CROSS: For independent schools, the main benefit is enhanced security. Accessibility is another key benefit, allowing faculty, staff and students to access applications and data from anywhere. It also eases the IT load, with less maintenance and fewer updates to manage. Finally, it offers savings through predictable subscription pricing, reducing the need for significant capital expenditure on hardware and software licenses.