When COVID-19 forced school to close in March of 2020, many districts understood the value of cloud-hosted solutions for running their operations remotely. Cloud-based solutions ultimately allowed schools to keep students fed and educated. Because of cloud hosted technology, work (and almost anything) is possible from anywhere.
In addition, school nutrition programs everywhere adapted their food service during the pandemic thanks in large part to cloud-hosting technology. Colorado’s Greeley-Evans School District 6 directly experienced this benefit.
With over 37 district sites, the team at Greeley-Evans were able to quickly pivot to a remote environment and continue to provide nutritious meals to their students with the help of a 100% cloud and browser-based school nutrition management system. Danielle Bock, Nutrition Director for Greeley-Evans, told us her team made it through because of the cloud-based TITAN system.
“I can’t even imagine what my world would have been like for the last twelve months were we not on a cloud-based solution,” Bock said.
And yet, despite all the benefits districts experience when using cloud solutions, some are finding themselves wary of making the switch to a cloud infrastructure. We’re here to help you through this journey.
Let’s take a look at the top three myths of cloud hosting and how you can overcome the negative perceptions of cloud computing.
Cloud Hosting Myth #1: The up-front costs are too overwhelming
It’s true: the price tag for a cloud migration can be high. Yet, despite the initial cost, cloud computing is ultimately an investment that can yield big savings. In fact, the lower total cost of cloud ownership is actually why most districts make the switch. Here are the cost benefits you can expect when switching to cloud-hosted solutions:
- Money savings on redundant servers
- Paying only for what you use – nothing more
- No capital costs
- Free up IT staff to focus on other business priorities
Working in an older system that was not being updated or maintained was very frustrating, which is why TITAN’s hosted solution was so appealing. Now, we don’t need special hardware, expensive hardware warranties, and have one less server to maintain.
Nicholas De Pauw | Director of Information Technology | Patterson Unified School District
Cloud Hosting Myth #2: It’s unsafe
The truth is that with more users coming in and out of physical IT centers, cloud hosting is a more secure choice.
According to K‑12 Cyber Secure, COVID-19 also brought new security challenges resulting in: school closures, millions of dollars of stolen taxpayer dollars, and student data breaches directly linked to identity theft and credit fraud.
Cloud hosting protects your data against physical and virtual cybersecurity threats. The vendors you work with should provide security services and protocols to safeguard your sensitive PHI data, including things like incident response plans, malware protection, secured access controls, a security operations center, and SOC 2 compliance.
With LINQ, you benefit from multiple disaster backup and recovery services to ensure the data recovery process is efficient.
Cloud Hosting Myth #3: It is too complicated
Migrating to the cloud may seem daunting if you aren’t working with the right experts. Districts and schools typically have capable IT professionals on staff, but they often lack the specific knowledge required for migration. Or they have other strategic initiatives claiming their focus.
However, top technology vendors make the experience seamless by creating standard migration strategies and communicating them often. Top vendors secure your data by leveraging encryption—in transit or at rest—ensuring an outage doesn’t occur during the migration process.
Cloud Hosting Truth: Your K‑12 school district deserves flexibility and security
On-premise solutions often lack the flexibility needed to facilitate remote environments and create added labor for IT professionals. Cloud-hosted solutions make it possible to pivot your district operations or to manage your district from any location.
In addition, on-premise solutions create a lot of extra work. From updates to patches to outages, IT professionals end up spending more time making software work instead of focusing on other things. For example, all updates are automatic in the TITAN school nutrition system by LINQ. In addition, the TITAN system is completely browser-based, so IT doesn’t have manage any new hardware!
The point: don’t allow your fears of price, security, or complexity get in the way of your district benefitting from cloud-hosted solutions. The other side is truly greener.