Cloud

What Private and Independent Schools Get from Moving to the Cloud

Without a modern technology infrastructure, private schools could leave teachers and students behind.

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Cari Warnock is the CDW education ambassador for K-12 scale. She has more than 20 years of experience in public education and is focused on building strategy and alliances to impact work with education organizations that may differ from “traditional” districts, including regional service centers; charter, magnet, and parochial/private schools; and more.

Maintaining an aging technology infrastructure could make it challenging for private and independent schools to modernize learning. With traditionally smaller student enrollments at these schools and even smaller technology teams, making the leap to the cloud could make way for IT to do more with fewer appliances to maintain. That could in turn make way for more robust instructional technology integration.

While some private schools have embraced the future-forward cloud computing model, the trend is not yet universal. There are several reasons that private schools might be hesitant to jump into the cloud, including cost, a lack of support from the head of school, lack of knowledge on the IT leader’s part, worries about in-house cloud management skills, and concerns about the security of student data in the cloud.

However, private school IT leaders who have transitioned to the cloud say that moving to the cloud relieved a lot of those concerns. In one of my conversations with an IT leader at a very well-funded private school in the Southeastern U.S., he said that moving his servers off-premises gave the school much-needed space and increased collaboration among workers and students.

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Moving to the Cloud Leads to Flexibility, Scalability and Efficiency

Just like other organizations, private schools can benefit from institutionwide flexibility and scalability. In some cases, independent schools rent spaces for years. A school may start out renting a K–5 site for several years and later want to add a middle school at a second location. Funding and then building out a data center at the secondary site could slow down growth. However, with cloud, scalability is already built in. It’s not an all-or-nothing equation. The school can keep some data on-premises at the first location and spin up additional compute power at a second location when needed.

Additionally, smaller technology teams might be too busy managing and maintaining devices, switches, routers and legacy servers to support modern learning.

However, a modern infrastructure goes hand in hand with integrating technology into the teaching and learning experience. In future-ready private schools, teachers are using technology to meet a variety of needs for students who may need to learn from home, those with disabilities, those who use robust tools like AutoCAD and need virtual desktops, or even those who might want to use artificial intelligence in a more powerful way. To make this type of learning environment standard in private schools, technology leaders will need to spend less time managing tools and more time working with educators to build modern learning models.

Another challenge that comes with spending too much time manually maintaining appliances is that sometimes other important things fall by the wayside, such as building a data governance strategy. IT teams can also sometimes be too busy to address some of the challenges around student and parent data privacy and a lack of interoperability between key systems, which can lead to bigger problems in the long run.

In a recent CDW report, IT leaders indicate that a desire for more security was one of their main reasons for moving to the cloud. Additionally, moving data to the cloud can make it easier for disparate systems to talk to each other, which will drive efficiency for schools with limited staff and time.

How Private Schools Can Secure Leadership Buy-In for Cloud

Most private school leaders have a very strong background in education but know very little about technology. Their hesitation to upgrade technology could be leaving their schools years behind. When IT leaders receive pushback from their heads of school, chief business officers, chief academic officers and other members of the C-suite about upgrading their technical infrastructure, IT leaders must step in and educate them on how the new technology can benefit schools in the long term.

IT leaders at private schools must come prepared to have several conversations with their leadership teams. Organizations such as the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools and CoSN often provide resources that can help with the education process. For example, cost is often the biggest barrier in having this conversation. IT leaders can use CoSN’s value of investment guide to discuss dollar savings, efficiencies, revenue generation and qualitative benefits and how it relates to the school’s vision, mission, goals and mandates. Seeing these numbers would be particularly useful for the chief business officer.

DIG DEEPER: Efficient cloud cost management can benefit K–12 schools.

Private Schools Must Seek Education and Partnership

Moving everyone in the direction of the cloud will require some long-term planning. Several private school technology leaders who made the leap have told me that acquiring cloud competence was an important step. They note that getting training helped them to confidently lead the charge for their nontechnical counterparts. They also went on to train their technical staff so their team members could manage the school’s resources in the cloud.

As part of the cloud consideration process, IT leaders should also read CDW’s cloud computing research report, assess their cloud readiness, vet their vendor partners for security and plan a cloud governance model.

Private school leaders do not need to walk this path alone. CDW has an award-winning team made up of highly experienced cloud engineers who can help you on this journey. Our experts have worked with many schools to make the transition to the cloud and can share K–12 trends along with migration best practices. They would be happy to speak to your leaders, alumni groups and advancement teams. Talk to your CDW representative to learn more or email our small schools team at digitaledtech@cdw.com to get started.

This article is part of the ConnectIT: Bridging the Gap Between Education and Technology series.