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.