How The Cloud Can Change the K-12 Landscape

      A lot of attention has been paid to how the "Cloud", and Cloud Solutions are the saving grace of small businesses. Allowing companies to grow without the initial upfront investment of technology infrastructures, allows companies to allocate those funds to different departments for development. Solutions range from providing mobility to employees, to allowing IT staff to allocate resources and applications in reduced time frames. These are all great reasons to compel any company to consider taking their infrastructure to the Cloud, but what about school districts?

      The benefits that companies achieve by migrating to the cloud, streamlined support, reduced energy consumption, mobility, deploying applications quickly, the list goes on and on. School districts that have seen their budgets cut should be looking at ways of getting a higher return on their investment. Schools that purchase software utilized by students on a traditional network are taking advantage of their investment for only 8 hours a day, at most. By migrating to a cloud infrastructure those same students could have 24/7 access to the tools that the district invests large sums of money in.
      
       Dog ate my homework....

       Everyone has heard the excuses used by students for why they don't have their homework. What if you had the ability to control students, no not in a Jedi mind trick way, but in a real sense of controlling how students learn. Imagine, if a student is working from home and the computer they are using crashes, everything that student has done is gone, forever. Pictures created in kindergarten, book reports from 5th grade, research projects from high school, all gone. An entire road map of that students progress completely gone in an electronic blue smoke filled second. Now imagine the same scenario but, the student is accessing their Cloud, the same computer goes up in an electronic blue smoke filled second. The student gets up moves to another computer logs into their cloud and picks up where they left off with the same session running continuously in a high availability environment.
      IT staffing has always been an issue with school districts. In a past life I worked with school districts in another capacity and many times found myself speaking with English teachers, or Math teachers who had some computer experience. Due to the scale of a district and the logistics with supporting the various locations of data centers, districts would simply pass IT responsibilities to the most knowledgeable person at that location. Many times without the training necessary to support a district properly. With cloud solutions the complexity of monitoring many different workstations can be done from one central location. One individual could monitor an entire virtual network from one physical location lowering IT costs associated with downtime, help desk requests, and travel expenses.
    
       With school districts constantly looking for ways to increase access to curriculum and decreasing expenses, cloud technology can provide the solution to many of the issues school districts face.

Musings from a Cloud CMO

 

       Cloud solutions are not going anywhere. You have two choices, either get on board or get left behind. Many IT professionals are singing praises over how great and wonderful Cloud infrastructures are, but that is their job. They understand the back end technologies that go into producing Cloud infrastructures, and they are amazed at how incredibly intricate the design of the server casing is. They relish in the ability to play with configuration settings, and bandwidth tests, but the truth is that the end user who comes in to work every morning, turns on their computer to immediately read about press halting news from sources like Facebook and Twitter, well they just don't care what virtual farm they are accessing this information from, how much bandwidth they are utilizing, all they care about is that it works. That's where this blog comes in. I will be exploring how our company is deploying Cloud solutions for our clients, breaking, "The Cloud" down, and providing information on the changes that are on the horizon for Cloud Solutions.
       As Chief Marketing Officer for a technology consulting firm, we are knee deep in soft, fuzzy cloud technology and we are working to bring that technology to as many companies, government agencies, doctors offices, lawyers, and even school districts we can. But, the main issue we face as a consulting firm is helping people understand the catch phrase, Cloud Solutions, and what it means for them.
     Cloud technology is new, immature, and exciting, all of which bring to mind many different scenarios for many different people. If you're a first mover, this is a great opportunity for your company to have the latest technology first. If you're slower to market it could mean that you are reviewing all options before making a decision and when that time comes, which should be sooner rather then later, Cloud technology could be for you. If your a dinosaur and still do math with an abacus then by the time you read this we will be flying around in hover cars, but by then, even you will utilize Cloud technology in some way.