It’s not just businesses that are moving to the cloud, but almost every organization across all spheres of work are looking to make the most of what cloud computing offers. In fact, school districts are increasingly moving to the cloud as it helps them to make the best use of their resources, not to mention the improved connectivity and better reach that comes with it. The latest school district to make this transition is the Michigan school district.

More than a dozen schools in the southwestern Michigan are undergoing a transition to the cloud, so the district could thousands of dollars in a single year. At a time when budget crunches are impacting the way education is imparted to children, this move could potentially improve the facilities and maybe even bring in more qualified teachers to give a great learning experience to the children in these districts.

The best part about this transition is that most teachers and students don’t even know that the underlying infrastructure is being upgraded – that’s really how smooth it is.

Much of this easy transition can be attributed to the fact that the Michigan school district is moving only one application at one time. For example, Moodle, the learning system used by the schools in Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency (KRESA), was one of the first applications to be moved to the cloud.

With the successful transition of this application, the others are likely to follow soon. The entire move is handled by Southwest MiTech, an IT consortium that handles all tech related work in schools located in the Kalamazoo area. This consortium handles everything from purchasing computers to deciding on infrastructural changes. Currently, it provides support to 12 schools and four charter school in this area.

For this transition, the Michigan School District has decided to go ahead with AWS. Though the infrastructure manager of Southwest MiTech is a fan of Microsoft’s products, he still chose AWS over Azure because of a combination of advanced infrastructure, features and availability.

So far, they have completed about 15 percent of the transition, but the consortium and the Michigan School District expect the rest of the transition to be smooth as well. In an interview, the consortium opined that it is the initial start that’s tough because of the potential hiccups that can arise. So, they wanted to start small and take cautious steps. But now that the initial transition is done., we can expect the rest of the transition to speed up.

Overall, this is a sensible move by the Michigan school district and we hope that more such school districts take a proactive approach to move their applications to the cloud, so it can benefit everyone, especially the young children.

 

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