While the district was previously maintaining a sizable data center that incurred ongoing chiller system and backup generator costs, Florence 1 Schools has since transitioned to pay-as-you-go pricing and just two onsite racks.
“If we want to do something that needs a lot of GPU and CPU power, I don’t need to purchase a farm of servers,” Freeman says. “I rent those. If it only takes me five minutes, that’s all I pay for. I can spin them up, do the work and spin them back down.”
How Cloud Cost Analysis Differs From Cloud Cost Management
Cloud cost analysis involves assessing the expenses incurred by schools’ use of the cloud and IT infrastructure. K–12 IT teams can use cloud cost management tools in tandem with cloud cost analysis to optimize and control their expenditures.
For example, school leaders may examine what they’ve paid for hardware infrastructure elements, their virtual machine-related costs and data transfer patterns, such as the amount of information moving between cloud resources, including the corresponding cost.
After reviewing their expenses, they might choose to adopt a different pricing model or move additional items to the cloud from on-premises storage. Cloud cost management software can help organizations continue to track their usage.
DON’T MISS: How did Indianapolis Public Schools make the leap to the cloud?
Cloud Spend Management Tools and Expertise From Vendors
Several cloud service providers offer resources that can assist schools with cloud cost analysis and cloud cost management. Microsoft Azure’s cost analysis feature can help organizations monitor and assess their monthly bills, and IBM’s online calculator gauges pricing for the IBM Cloud product configurations.
Florence 1 Schools used online cost analysis tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to evaluate its cloud-related spending for the next three to five years.
“I can see if I were to move this over, here is what my monthly spend looks like,” Deputy Superintendent Kyle Jones says. “That helps the end user make those decisions.”
The AWS team members who’ve provided guidance throughout the district’s cloud journey are happy to hop on calls to offer support, Freeman says.
“We ran into a stumbling block: Part of our financial system depended on Microsoft SQL Server for the back end,” he says. “AWS was able to pull in an expert who had a breadth of esoteric knowledge. Without that, we wouldn't have been able to go as fast or full as we needed to.”
States Provide Cloud Management Approaches for Schools
Two educational technology initiatives in Michigan have also used AWS cloud spending management tools and insight to pinpoint expenses.
Michigan’s MiGreatDataLake project, stemming from a $13.5 million Michigan Department of Education grant, involves the creation of a platform to collect, analyze and share educational data from multiple school districts with the goal of facilitating operational efficiency and personalized student learning opportunities.
LEARN MORE: School leaders reveal what life is like in the cloud.
Meanwhile, a $31.6 million Michigan Department of Education grant awarded to the Kalamazoo Regional Education Service Agency is funding the MiCloud program. The program will provide a centralized, secure cloud hosting option for K–12 districts, says Tammy Evans, MiCH IT director at the Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators.
Districts can have Microsoft- and AWS-certified solution architects review their current cloud infrastructure and design customized migration and implementation plans, which the districts can manage or engage KRESA’s MiCloud team to install and maintain.
Michigan schools can also consider the cybersecurity benefits of these opportunities, such as enhanced disaster recovery capabilities. CoSN’s 2025 State of EdTech District Leadership report reveals that 34% of K–12 districts have experienced a cyberattack-related cloud service disruption.
“We’ve seen an enormous increase on attacks on education entities,” Evans says.
