Migrating 100 school districts to SchoolTool hosting 

Ensure continuity of operations 

Our goal was to migrate NERIC to the AWS cloud while ensuring operations continuity. As we transitioned the hosting to Mindex, it was imperative to maintain site availability. Our team also coordinated with NERIC the rollout of updates to their districts.  

NERIC now has more flexibility with regards to updates, as they no longer have to adhere to unfavorable downtimes. Updates now take place at night, so there is little to no disruption. 

Additionally, NERIC developed services for SchoolTool, including custom reports, integrations, and the ability to refresh, train, and quickly gather insights for school districts. Our solution allowed NERIC to continue managing all custom modifications they had previously developed. 

Offload Security Responsibility to Cloud Experts 

Mindex adheres to very strict privacy and security regulations as a cloud service provider working with companies in the healthcare and financial services industries. Our data security meets the NIST 800-53 r5 moderate standard, the US standard for critical infrastructure. In addition, SchoolTool exceeds NYS encryption requirements at rest and in transit while adhering to NIST CSF under Ed-Law 2d. 

By using Mindex cloud services to migrate SchoolTool to the cloud, NERIC put much of the security responsibility back on us, reducing its cybersecurity premiums. Moreover, it allowed them to implement more secure methods of logging into the SchoolTool application, sending emails, and integrating with third-party applications. 

Performance 

Before moving SchoolTool to the cloud, NERIC and Mindex shared responsibility for SchoolTool applications performance and infrastructure maintenance, including assigning adequate resources to each district, such as CPU, memory, and storage. Additionally, if performance issues arose, both Mindex and NERIC had to get involved to determine whether the code or infrastructure was at fault.  

As a result of migrating SchoolTool to the cloud, we can resolve performance issues quickly. If districts report performance issues or degradation, they can contact us directly, even if they are minor. Real-time application monitoring tools allow us to see how code and infrastructure respond to every request in real time. In addition to better visibility, we also receive faster turnaround times for performance issues. 

Time & Cost Savings 

As far as physical security is concerned, data centers are massive and fortress-like. To maintain them efficiently and securely, they require a lot of money and resources. With NERIC's data now residing in the cloud, they can reallocate the resources and time previously used to maintain their data center for other high-value tasks. 

Elastic Cloud Infrastructure 

Currently, we monitor NERIC school district clusters and scale them horizontally and/or vertically as needed. Soon, we'll be able to scale NERIC clusters automatically.  

As we move our new work to serverless cloud computing, we're transforming the traditional infrastructure model that cannot meet demand and is always overprovisioned into one that can dynamically adapt. 

For example, when multiple teachers submit grades simultaneously, we can surgically scale the grading application to meet demand and scale it back when demand is low. 

Quickly Deploy Updates

SchoolTool used to limit its major software updates to only three times a year—a typical cadence for on-premise software—as a way to minimize the burden on RIC and district IT staff, who had to painstakingly update physical servers in their environment. Thanks to the cloud, we're able to automatically roll an update out as soon it's available, allowing IT staff to focus on more valuable services for their district(s). Available updates are communicated and coordinated with RICs and school districts to ensure they happen at their preferred time, which is typically during off-hours to have minimal or no impact on users’ daily operations. 
 
SchoolTool will soon be streaming feature updates, allowing districts to take advantage of fixes immediately and helping to accelerate the pace of new feature development. Larger updates will be feature-flagged, permitting the RICs and school districts to determine when to roll them out to users based on their unique schedules. This will give RICs and districts the flexibility to act more autonomously with their SchoolTool instance. 

App Modernization

With NERIC school districts in the cloud, we can deploy cloud-native features in SchoolTool. These new capabilities and resources have allowed us to streamline our processes, automate the flow of code, and monitor software in real-time, resulting in more time and resources to focus on feature requests shared with us during user group sessions. 
 
Over the next year, Mindex will introduce new cloud-native features, such as our refactored gradebook, a new authentication and login framework, cloud-based online help, reimagined dashboards using cloud-native analytics, and so much more.