Dive Brief:
- Results from a May 2016 CDW-G survey show 67% of school IT solutions are now delivered either in part or in full through the cloud, up from 42% in June 2014 with the expectation that the portion will rise to 74% in three years.
- Improving student performance and instructional time quality are the top reasons why schools are moving services to the cloud, followed by cost savings and the reduced workload for on-site system management, according to a CDW infographic.
- Ed Tech Magazine reports data privacy and security remain concerns for IT professionals, along with budgets, but more than two-thirds of respondents said all three barriers are getting easier over time.
Dive Insight:
The CDW survey explored how schools are using the cloud, finding that some of the top uses are delivering digital curriculum materials and open educational resources, improving communication and collaboration with the school community, enabling teachers and students to connect in new ways, offering opportunities to innovate in the classroom and freeing up IT teams to work on ed tech. More than three-quarters of respondents have email, storage, web hosting, collaboration apps, disaster recovery and traditional business apps in the cloud, with disaster recovery making the biggest leap from 2014, when only 33% of schools had that in the cloud.
Symantec’s 2016 Internet Security Threat Report found education tied with business for the second-most-breached subsector. Security concerns are very real, but cloud storage has been offered up as a way to protect against threats from ransomware. If local files become corrupted, cloud backups can help get systems back online faster.
