Multicloud Computing in Education: Why Schools Benefit

“When I’m talking about multicloud, I’m just saying we’re using more than one cloud environment,” says Ryan Johnson, CTO for Rocklin Unified School District in California. The district uses a mix of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and Google resources for use cases ranging from backup and recovery to data analytics.

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Amy McLaughlin, project director for CoSN’s Cybersecurity and Network and Systems Design Initiatives as well as the executive director of technical and solutions architecture at Oregon State University, notes that the move to multicloud isn’t always intentional.

“People are moving to multicloud environments because different providers offer different capabilities,” McLaughlin says. “You’re going to have a hard time finding organizations that don’t have some sort of multiproduct approach. They might not call it ‘multicloud,’ but that’s essentially what it is.”

How Does Multicloud Computing Work in Education?

While the large cloud vendors offer many similar capabilities, McLaughlin says, districts often end up placing resources outside of their “primary” public cloud environments in order to support specific cloud-hosted applications.

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“Say I have everything in Google because it’s running my Chromebooks and delivering my email,” she says. “But my learning management system and student information system are both hosted in AWS. In that case, I’ll want to make sure I have good connectivity to both environments.”

Johnson notes that his team decides where to host applications and infrastructure on a case-by-case basis. “There are pluses and minuses to it,” he says. “It’s always nice to have full control of your data when it’s on-premises. But it’s also nice to be able to push upkeep, maintenance and security tasks out to our cloud providers."

How Does Hybrid Cloud Benefit School Districts?

The greatest benefit of a multicloud model, Johnson says, is flexibility. “It lets you adapt and use different environments how you see fit,” he says.

McLaughlin notes that certain applications and services may not be offered in a district’s primary cloud environment. “If you look outside that environment, you have opportunities to meet specific needs for specific capabilities,” she says. “Something you need may not be available in your primary cloud space, but it’s a service that is easy to consume and leverage in another cloud.”

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A multicloud approach also offers something of a hedge against catastrophic outages, McLaughlin says. “When you go all-in on one provider, and that provider has a problem, then you have a problem with everything,” she explains. “There are benefits to diversification, because your whole ship might not sink for an entire day if something goes wrong.”

However, McLaughlin warns, districts must carefully monitor and manage costs and complexity as they move to a multicloud model. “You absolutely need to establish an inventory process and know what you have and where it is sitting, just like you would if the resources were onsite,” she says.

Should Your School Consider Multicloud?

Although most school districts will end up with some footprint in multiple clouds, McLaughlin says that a dedicated multicloud strategy is typically a better fit for larger districts with more varied needs.

“The smaller and more contained your organization is, the less desirable multicloud becomes,” she says. “If you’re a large and complicated district that has a lot of services to provide, it’s much more likely that you’re going to head toward a multicloud strategy because you’re going to have different needs. It’s really a question of how much complexity your environment can absorb while still delivering those services.”

Johnson notes that staffing can often become a limiting factor in how many different cloud services a district can leverage. “There are two things that hinder us when we’re making these decisions,” he says. “No. 1 is whether we have people who understand the technical side of the cloud and synchronizing different environments. The second is having someone who understands how to structure pricing, because once you move up to the cloud, it’s no longer a one-time capital cost.”

Even in districts with thoughtful multicloud strategies, Johnson says, IT and educational leaders will continue to learn as they go. “Start where you’re comfortable with it,” he says. “And then experiment.”