Covid-19 affected every industry and walk of life. While some industries have returned to their ‘Pre-Covid' status, the education community is feeling longer-lasting effects. Students in K-12 schools endured a confusing and complicated transition over the past three years. The shift started when in-person classrooms moved to fully remote classes at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but gradually transitioned to hybrid schooling and ultimately returned back to in-person classrooms.

New & old challenges for infrastructure technology in education

This change in learning modality may not have affected professionals used to video conferencing or those working remotely, but for the majority of students, it was quite a challenge. Each learning application, video conferencing option, and attendance tool had its own learning ramp. Additionally, the discipline required by students to work on their own without a classroom setting was new to just about everyone. Some students were able to quickly adapt while other students fell behind, unable to keep up with the new learning paradigm.

Schools across the country had to scramble to enable online and hybrid learning with minimal notice or time to develop detailed strategies. How would school districts adapt already limited IT budgets, and additionally, how would school districts ensure privacy, accessibility, and security within their schools?

Something that isn’t so new, but is still a challenge is that school districts have been battling with limited resources and increasing costs while trying to get local municipalities to approve budget increases to cover increased costs for technologies. Add to this, an ever-increasing risk of ransomware and cyber-attacks that could create system lockouts or loss of data and privacy and you’ve got a less than perfect situation for everyone involved. In fact, the Federal Bureau of Investigations announced that 2020 was a record-breaking year for cyber-attacks against schools and that this was the top target of hackers looking for prime targets.

Ideal for a limited budget: Wasabi cloud storage and data protection

How can IT leaders in K-12 adopt technologies that fit within a limited budget and offer protection against ransomware attacks?

Cloud technologies, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) tools increase schools’ effectiveness within K-12 learning environments. Further, these technology options aid school districts that are affected by supply chain issues also caused by the impact of Covid-19. In fact, “44% of IT leaders planned to shift application processing to the cloud to lessen the impact of IT supply chain disruption.”

If a school district were to decide to adopt cloud technology, finding the right fit creates a fresh batch of challenges. Cloud service hyperscalers like Amazon or Azure carry expensive tiers and additional charges for egress and API requests, which certainly doesn’t meet the affordability criteria schools are looking for. Google once provided educators with free storage and services, and now even they are making schools pay up.

Wasabi’s low cost and elimination of storage tiers make budgeting for school districts much more predictable all while simplifying digital transformation. In the spirit of education, let’s use a math example:

Let’s say you want to store a petabyte of storage for one year and will be egressing and/or API requesting data 20% of the time. With one of the Big 3 cloud providers, the average annual cost is around $300,000. By storing your data with Wasabi’s hot cloud storage, the annual cost would be just over $70,000. On average, Wasabi costs just 1/5th the price of hyperscalers.

What about protection against cyber-attacks? Schools often turn to Wasabi to ensure their data is protected because of features like our ‘11 nines’ of data durability and Object Lock for S3 immutable storage, which when enabled, eliminates the ability for anyone to change, delete or move data for a pre-set period of time. Even if your primary data is compromised, Wasabi has your backups protected from even the savviest hackers.

Affordable and predictable cloud storage with industry-leading data durability and immutability to protect against ransomware attacks, all without confusing pricing tiers: that’s like having your cake and eating it too.

Learn more about how Wasabi hot cloud storage can help enable your K-12 school district’s digital transformation while closely managing costs and security.