Moving to the K-12 CloudA Case Study of Gibraltar Area Schools

Our Little School

• Gibraltar Area Schools is a public K-12 school district in Fish Creek Wisconsin that serves approximately 110 employees and 565 students with one IT director.• Our IT customers, therefore, are our students, faculty and staff, which

totals about 675 people. Our website is www.gibraltar.k12.wi.us• We are located on a geographical oddity know as a “Peninsula”.

When and why we looked into the cloud• No onsite help or equipment quickly. We don’t have venders with

teams of technicians to ‘swing by’ and help on a project or repair hardware. • Our nearest school is over an hour away and the nearest major city is

over two hours.• June 2011 - Our on premise servers have a five year cycle plan. • At that time everyone was looking into virtual machine servers to

replace the aging racks of old iron.• The cost of a VM system didn’t seem to fit our schools’ budget, so we

decided to look for other options.

The Future of Technology in Education

“This technology has been going on this way for years. The question is -

are you coming with?”

Who we evaluated

• We looked at Azure, AWS and Rackspace.• The evaluation process was a bit non-traditional. • With one IT person, the vendor’s service is key. • We wanted to evaluate each offering for the products ease of use, the

vendor’s time in market space, their support and frequency of new offerings.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant

Why we selected AWS

• Azure and Rackspace didn’t have the same track record as AWS and hadn’t been offering cloud services for as long as Amazon. • Amazon Web Services had many more options that fit our needs than

the other competitors. • Outstanding technical support at an amazingly low rate. • After choosing AWS and paying $100 for a month’s support, I was

speaking to a certified Cisco Network Administrator that connected my network device to a virtual private cloud.• Gibraltar Area Schools choose a vendor in December of 2011 and

started immediately.

Deployment

• We are a small and flexible school so it’s a great place to experiment with big ideas. • Slight changes to our network or services will not disrupt learning in

the same manner it may in a very large and complex company or educational institution. • Some our students and staff requiring our information systems access

both inside and outside the building. • Most of our traffic is sensitive information that should be accessed in

the building and we needed to host it inside a VPC.

What went well & lessons learned

• Cost savings. There are no licensing issues to deal with and absolutely no hardware maintenance. • Now we can offer new services and technology to our staff quickly

and without hardware planning.• 8 servers are running for a few pennies per hour.• Gibraltar Area Schools is paying roughly $1 per student per month

with this deployment. The savings there is much better than my old iron servers when you factor in the absence of hardware maintenance.• We pay more for toner than servers.

Major benefits

• Its Fast – 20 minutes for a new server. I would have to wait for shipping, install, purchase software, license, house the device in a temperature regulated area, purchase backup hardware and physically maintain the box. • Buying hardware is more expensive and it’s “old school”.• Gibraltar now has access to prepackaged server configurations and

software that we didn’t have before. Some of the newest network devices are available as a virtual network device on Amazon. Palo Alto, Fortinet and Ubiquiti were first on our list to setup and test before purchasing the product.

Future plans

• Gibraltar Area Schools would like to migrate the remaining on premises servers to the cloud. • E-Rate everything we can.• “A High School in a Box” scenario. One fiber connection to a building

running through a switch and to wireless access points. That’s it. No domain servers, databases hardware, communication equipment, backup or web filtering devices. Nothing in house – just glass and wifi.

Advice to other schools

• Gibraltar Area Schools chose the right evaluation points when looking for the best vendor. The most important categories to an IT person are the products ease of use, the vendor’s time in market space, their support and frequency of new offerings.• Try a free account & talk with the vendor.

Gibraltar Contacts

Steve MintenDistrict Director of IT

Gibraltar Area Schoolssminten@gibraltar.k12.wi.us

• https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/gibraltar-area-schools/• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/gibraltar-area-schools-the-leap-to-t

he-cloud-saves-50-in-5-years/• https://www.districtadministration.com/article/school-gain-cloud-confidence