Dive Brief:

• Districts are increasingly building private cloud storage systems, maintained on their own servers by district IT staff.
• The third largest district in Texas, Cypress-Fairbanks, has centralized all tech services, using $200 million in bond money, and has placed its crucial services on a separate, even more robust grid.
• Raytown Quality Schools in Missouri established a private cloud a decade ago and is now upgrading storage capacity.

Dive Insight:

For districts considering an upgrade, district administrators who've gone down that road say to think long and hard before taking any steps. "You need a strong, committed staff" with a lot of expertise, Cypress-Fairbanks CTO Frankie Jackson told eSchool News. And the internal system will need support and maintenance, so support from higher-ups is crucial too.

And not everything must or can live behind district firewalls. Raytown, for example, switched from a district-managed email server to Gmail last year. 

"We look at each individual system to see if it's best for us to host it or have the provider host it," said Melissa Tebbenkamp, director of instructional technology for Raytown. "But when it comes to data that needs to be stored — my security video, my file storage — I'm going to host it internally in a private cloud instead of paying someone to host it, because I can buy storage cheaper, I can manage and secure it and know that I have control over what's happening with it."