1. Address Baseline Needs in Your Cloud Assessment
One reason your district should do a cloud assessment while choosing vendors is to make sure the vendor can meet your data needs. If they can’t, consider using multiple vendors.
To get a better sense of how a cloud vendor can best meet a district’s needs, IT leaders must ask themselves several questions: Is the primary need to secure data and have it available 24/7? Does IT need to be able to quickly restore that data after a ransomware or other cyberattack? Does the school need a robust Software as a Service solution for apps that students and staff use? Having specific answers to these questions will go a long way toward figuring out which vendors to vet.
2. Determine If You Should Migrate Everything to the Cloud
While you might want to move all of your school’s applications to the cloud, your cloud assessment could reveal that some apps need to remain onsite, for multiple reasons. You may need to keep backups in-house and have a second copy offsite. Knowing what you need to keep on-premises and what a cloud vendor can manage requires talking to your vendor about how they deal with hybrid setups.
DIVE DEEPER: Take a full-lifecycle approach to maturing your cloud.
3. Know Your Security Vulnerabilities Before Moving to the Cloud
Short-staffed IT departments often don’t have the time or resources to address ever-changing cybersecurity needs. An honest assessment of your school’s security vulnerabilities will help you decide what cloud services you want to examine and which vendors will have the best tools to help you accomplish your security goals.
4. Learn About Your Cloud Vendor’s Business Practices
It’s hard to ensure the security of your data if you don’t know your vendor partner’s practices for securing that data. Therefore, it’s crucial that you have a detailed discussion with the vendor and ask pointed questions about how it can ensure your data will be safe and accessible.
RELATED: What should schools ask before selecting a cloud security platform?
For instance, it’s important to know where backups are located. This is especially important because K–12 schools must comply with federal, state and local regulations governing student data privacy. Also, delays could occur if the backups are stored in a location that your systems cannot access.
5. Collaborate with Vendors to Make the Migration Process Smoother
Simply porting your current data set and applications from in-house servers to the cloud is one way to operate, but it may not address all of your security or data availability concerns. Doing so may close off access to tools and applications that make things easier for students, administrators and IT staff. As part of the cloud assessment process, being open to vendors’ ideas and collaborating on changes and upgrades will minimize the need for incremental changes down the road.
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