5 Reasons Why School Districts Should Invest in the Cloud

IT infrastructure is often a top priority for school districts. There are many dependencies on web portals and reporting tools that teachers, students, parents, and administrative staff access on a daily basis. Oftentimes, there is a small team in the background that manages an on-premise solution that is tricky to scale up and costly to maintain. Many pain points of this process can be eased by migrating data pipeline processes onto cloud-based data platforms. Read on for a list of five reasons why your school district should invest in the cloud!

1. Save Time from Beginning to End

School district administrators are often dealing with tight timelines and expanding responsibilities. One of the main ways that you can see a return on your migration to the cloud is in time savings. Cloud platforms allow you to implement your cloud data pipeline in half the time of an on-premise solution. A cloud-based system enables a solution that allows tools to automate your daily loads and speed up all processing. You can also spend less time on maintenance as the built-in features take care of the fine-tuning automatically.

2. More Team Collaboration

Cloud platforms enable you to customize access to your data platforms to allow users to have read-only access while still maintaining a single environment. You can create separation between data so each user gets access only to what they need, but also create queries that combine useful data points from multiple different vendors. These custom permissions create more transparency for the entire team to understand the data pipeline process. Low code tools also make it accessible to all, there is no need to be a professional programmer.

3. Adapt and Scale as You Do

As your district evolves and invests in new tools and platforms, you can easily incorporate these new data sources into your cloud data platform. Adjust and test new data without impacting your daily production loads. Cloud platforms also have levers that can be utilized to save on cost as usage and size of data continue to expand. Easily start with your prominent data sources to serve high priority reporting, and then expand as time and budget allows.

4. Streamline Data Pipeline

Avoid a confusing and disparate data pipeline with conflicting schedules and out-of-sync reports by building cloud workflows that ingest and transform data on a consistent schedule. Utilize the error reporting tools to make sure that all data is up to date and any issues can be resolved in a timely manner. Cloud platforms also allow for upfront formatting on incoming data so you can maintain a consistent structure for all data sources, thus ensuring effective and clean reporting.

5. Ease Security Concerns

Cloud platforms have very transparent security policies that they provide to all of their customers. Many also have a wide range of security certifications and adhere to the NIST Security Framework. Cloud platforms come with many user-administered security controls such as MFA capabilities, Network Policies, Data Masking, and Federated Authentication.

There are many more reasons that it might make sense for your school district to move to the cloud. The implementation process can happen without interrupting service to any users, so there is no need to wait or find the perfect time to make this migration happen.

If your school district is ready to make the leap to a cloud-based data platform, we'd love to talk strategy! Get in touch with our team by visiting the link below!

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