Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Tips For K-12 School Administrators

By Will Newns, Cloud and Managed Services Sales Specialist, CDI Managed Services

In today’s world, disaster recovery (DR) solutions are more than just smart; they are critical. In shared K-12 environments, sometimes spanning multiple cities or counties with millions of students, you need a reliable solution from a reliable IT provider.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy damaged nearly 350,000 residential structures, home to millions of people throughout New Jersey. The disaster took the lives of dozens of people and left millions in the dark with no power in their homes, schools, or businesses. In one small town, the only K-8 school was flooded with four feet of water that forced it to remain closed for nearly 240 days as reconstruction costs soared above $8 million.

Today, many state school districts around the country are sharing services and joining together to share the cost of advanced IT backup and recovery solutions. As a K-12 IT administrator, you already know, or are rapidly learning, that cloud-based solutions are the smart new way to go.

Where to Start?

We still find some schools using traditional magnetic tapes or optical disks (CD/DVD) for backups. In fact, some IT departments often bring tape to different buildings within the district (don’t get me started on the problems that causes!). However, most clients have switched to hard drives because they are cheaper, faster, and more reliable.

We recommend taking advantage of the deduplication or smart compression features in your backup software. In a typical day, up to 98 percent of your data remains the same. You don’t need to waste time backing up that substantial portion again.

Even though most application software and OS vendors support online downloads, you should back up the operating systems and applications on your servers. Virtualized servers provide an easier way to backup and restore. And backups are much easier to perform because you’re dealing with a single physical server.

Make sure you have your original license information, media, a backup image, or download instructions. After an emergency, you can easily refer to this information to restore your software applications.

You should save your personal documents in one or two familiar folders that you regularly back up or in an automated tool such as Microsoft OneDrive. You won’t have to go tracking down files to back up since they are already synchronized on the server.

A typical regional school district will back up files updated daily or hourly on a high-performance server for fast access. Occasionally-accessed files would be stored on a hard drive, flash drive, or DVD, while archives can be stored on tape, disks, or remotely in the cloud.

We recommend automating the upload and download of data files using special software that orchestrates the shift from local on-premise storage to the cloud. Your staff will expect the faster performance delivered locally. However, you should also configure a set of conditions that apply for all teachers and administrators where archival files are automatically pushed to the cloud, freeing up disk space and staff time.

School admins and staff typically take advantage of automated backups for their most important administrative and financial records, public safety and maintenance logs, HR data, and, of course, student registration and academic data.

Next, let’s examine what some schools are doing in greater detail.

A Closer Look: District 1

Within a single pane of glass, backup software in this New Jersey district processes more than 75 virtual servers.

Other key points:

Monthly full backups
Daily incremental backups
HR, financial data and student information
Replication of local backup to CDI’s cloud
Local repository for rollbacks
Offsite recovery center
Virtual servers eliminate need to manually reinstall the OS, apps, and data files

A Closer Look: District 2

This New Jersey school district is among the top five in the state to transition from procuring on-prem servers to virtualizing in the cloud.

Highlights:

75 teaching and administrative support staff
Over 680 students; but enrollment is declining
IT spending down by about one-eighth
Lower energy costs
Reduced time-to-market, configuration, and administrative overhead
Lower service and support costs with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
5-year savings of nearly $50,000 that would have been lost to server hardware and databases
Exploring next-generation cloud-based OS updates, email server, domain backup systems, file storage, wireless network management, and security systems

Cloud Security

According to a recent public-school survey, nearly half of K–12 IT professionals consider security issues to be a major barrier to adopting cloud computing.

Their top three concerns were:

Data Breaches: Unauthorized access to your personal, academic, health, financial, or business data. Examples include phone numbers, social security numbers, or medical data. Over the last ten years, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse estimates that 14 million records were leaked to the public through some 700 breaches at educational institutions. Safety measures include awareness programs, encryption, and blocking or ignoring phishing scam attempts.
Insufficient Due Diligence: Do your homework! As an IT administrator, take the time to research, plan, document requirements, and adopt the right cloud technologies before you sign the contract. Know your managed services provider (MSP) including how backups run, which data is protected, service-level agreement (SLA) terms, and privacy and sharing policies. Consult online information about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Cloud Security Alliance, and the National Cyber Security Alliance Stay Safe Online guidelines.
Education and Awareness: Be careful to read the small print, terms, disclaimers, and agreements before you use any online or mobile app service. CDI will help you sort through the options and deliver the best solution for you.

FERPA:

34 CFR Part 99: The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to schools that receive funding from U.S. Department of Education programs. FERPA protects the privacy of student records, establishes the right of students to review their records, and offers guidelines for the correction of inaccurate and misleading information.

A school system needs written permission from the parent or student before releasing any information from their education record. However, FERPA allows schools to disclose those records to certain parties without consent under special conditions such as for educational, safety, audit, or academic transfer matters. Parents and eligible students may request that a school corrects inaccurate records or resolves disputes at a formal hearing.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Tips:

Establish an emergency plan that includes primary and alternate meeting locations and communication methods.
Maintain a separate physical volume for the preservation of e-mail, distinct from your production e-mail system.
Set up a nightly backup system that is completely in the cloud or offsite by a distance of at least 10 miles with redundant failover in case the power goes out at both locations. Cloud backup at another geographical site provides the best protection and increases your chances of successful recovery.
Conduct a risk assessment and evaluate your data backup and retrieval system in terms of overall performance and reliability. Top security problems are data breaches and insufficient due diligence when it comes to safeguarding the system and implementing a proper backup system.
Set up automated daily backups so your staff members do not have to perform any manual backup steps.
Do not schedule backups during peak network hours. For example, if students are most active online completing assignments during the day and teaching staff are designing lesson plans through the evening, your backup system could clog the limited bandwidth. Some tools throttle the data replication with the cloud slowly during non-peak hours or even over several days.
Consider contracting with a cloud service provider to take on additional work activities beyond backups such as software patches, upgrades, data integrity audits, performance monitoring, and security.
If disaster does strike, prioritize the restoration of your payroll processing first. Financial security during this difficult time will help your staff and their families with recovery efforts.
Even if a backup server is old or damaged, your data is still recoverable. You may have to weigh the importance against the recovery fee.
A major benefit of offsite cloud backup is that they can start the recovery effort while you focus on the cleanup services your community is going to need after a tornado, hurricane, fire, flooding, or other disaster.
Some clients prefer a SAN or storage-area network on a dedicated server located in an offsite facility. We can configure easy access by mounting the SAN as a shared virtual drive on the school district shared network without consuming a lot of bandwidth.
In a traditional hardware model, workload demand drives up the cost of scaling up. The risks of not scaling up fast enough including exceeding capacity, slowing down, or even failing altogether. With a virtualized cloud-based model, enrollment can shift down or climb back up without those risks and constraints.
Contact utility and telecommunications providers to plan ahead, take precautions, and learn the steps they recommend for re-establishing service.
Communicate with parents and guardians as soon as possible after an incident. Then immediately contact your recovery team to set up a meeting and establish short-term and long-term priorities.

To get started with a solution or get answers to your questions, contact a professional provider like CDI Managed Services. We’ll help you sort through the options and deliver the best solution for you. Also, stay tuned for our exclusive group session presentation at the 2018 NJSBA Workshop in October, where I’ll take a deeper dive into the content above!

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