Cloud Governance in K–12 Schools: Why It’s Imperative for Your District

In cloud computing, the applications and operating systems may look the same as data center computing, or they may be entirely dissimilar. But either way, every part of managing and operating the infrastructure is altered from what traditional IT teams may be used to.

What Is Cloud Governance?

As with data governance, the idea behind cloud governance is that the state of every system is somehow predictable: We know how and why every server and application was built, and if something happens, we can build it again from scratch.

From an IT point of view, good governance means putting policies into place that detail how IT should be managed and continuously documented.

Governance can be time-consuming and burdensome. That’s why many K–12 IT teams — which are almost always short on resources — have not embraced terms like “maturity level” and “service management,” or implemented heavyweight change management processes for every firewall rule and Active Directory registry entry.

Are Cloud Migrations the Right Time for K–12 to Start Cloud Governance?

The greenfield approach to cloud migration offers a very attractive opportunity to IT teams. Instead of shoehorning governance into the existing workflows, as with brownfield migration, this gives IT teams the opportunity to build new workflows from scratch, adapted to the cloud, and to apply sound governance principles along the way.

For IT teams that are unsure whether they want to take on the extra burden of applying governance as part of their already-complicated cloud migrations, there’s another really good reason to do so: money.

Cloud computing is typically billed as a utility in that the more that you use, the more it costs. That’s very different from a data center, where everything in the data center represents a sunk cost, and the money is spent whether you use it or not. With cloud services, every CPU, every portion of memory, every Software as a Service user license and even traffic to and from the internet is chargeable.

DIVE DEEPER: Manage cloud spending to optimize costs.

Controlling these costs means controlling these resources. Good governance helps IT teams to deploy the resources they need and to release the rest. That translates into savings, which is almost always a primary concern for K–12 IT teams.

A Framework for K–12 Cloud Governance

 IT teams adding cloud governance to a blank slate can find lots of advice on the nitty-gritty details, but the framework should start with four broad categories: controls, processes, finances and monitoring.

Controls

Controls are all the standards and conventions you’ll use during day-to-day management of systems and applications. 

For example, identity and access management is a key starting point to ensure that cloud and school authentication are all well-synchronized. Firewall rules, naming standards and network architecture all fall into this category. Cloud vendors all provide extensive partitioning and tagging capabilities, which are important to help both in access control and in understanding who is paying for a system or application. If your district has a compliance requirement, this is where questions such as data classification and compliance monitoring are answered.

Processes

Processes are the ways to govern day-to-day parts of cloud management.

Ideally, IT teams should be looking at automation as much as possible to reduce human costs and human errors. But no matter how it’s done, every cloud operation should be defined and, most importantly, documented; provisioning and deprovisioning, scaling up and down, and storage management are just starting points.

The cyclical and seasonal nature of K–12 creates a great opportunity to build repeatable processes at the beginning and end of each school year, to cut costs as students move on and schools reduce staff during the summer.

Finances

Finances are so important to cloud governance that they get their own section in the framework.

Knowing that you’re on track with computing budgets will keep district management worries down. That aspect of governance involves generating the budget reports that both IT and upper management need, in a format they can easily understand. Set alerts for when costs begin to move out of your defined guardrails as well.

KEEP READING: Take control of cloud spending with the power of FinOps.

Monitoring

Finally, monitoring fills out the starter cloud governance framework.

Existing on-campus tools should be extended to cloud services where possible. However, K–12 IT teams should also take advantage of other tools that their cloud vendor makes available to them, such as alerts on performance, unusual activity, capacity limits and security issues like unauthorized access to cloud control dashboards. Most K–12 teams already have some type of security monitoring and incident response plan, but cloud migrations offer the opportunity to re-examine and improve that plan.

Of course, there are other elements of cloud governance beyond the ones mentioned above; internal reviews and audits, regular training, usage policies and aligning cloud with school district objectives all are important details that some districts will want to include.

IT teams that use their cloud migration as an opportunity to establish a cloud governance framework will find the effort worthwhile, as a way to deliver reliable services that are cost-effective, secure and compliant, and optimized for the K–12 environment.