Key Ways the Cloud can Help Solve the Edtech Challenges

Although necessary, the sudden transition to online learning overlooked basic cybersecurity precautions, placing virtual classrooms at a greater risk of attacks.

Fremont, CA: Our economy went through its most significant change in more than a decade, around a year and a half ago. Because no child's education gets placed on hold and learning cannot be suspended, schools, colleges, and universities had to move mountains to ensure that learning could continue as securely – and uninterruptedly – as possible.

It was no easy task, and even now, when new COVID-19 cases get discovered, whole year groups must get isolated.As a result, the sector's future remains unclear. While getting children back in classrooms and students back on campuses will surely be the first concern, the epidemic has spurred the industry to prepare for any scenario.

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Educational institutions, like companies, are working hard to guarantee that, if necessary, they can transition to remote learning on short notice, ensuring that education never gets disrupted as it was in 2020. However, even with virtual classes and video conferences, educators get confronted with a slew of new problems as they traverse the cloud-based world — some for the first time.

Scaling technology in education

When a company moves its activities to the cloud, it tries to do so as inexpensively as possible. It entails utilizing IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) platforms to obtain the storage and processing power they require flexibly, never paying for more than they use. In this sense, the education industry is no exception. It's especially true for higher education institutions, which frequently operate on restricted budgets and have limited spending power. During yearly application and clearing surges, colleges and universities will also require to scale up their processing and data-handling capacities substantially.

Ensuring security in the cloud

Before the pandemic, the education sector was already a favorite target for hackers, and the situation has only worsened in the last 18 months. Many educators' hasty rush to shift their operations online has resulted in cost-cutting and personnel who aren't yet sufficiently taught to recognize phishing schemes and possible ransomware attacks. Unfortunately, similar assaults are becoming all too common at UK institutions. Still, universities may significantly reduce the chance of falling victim to such an attack by implementing a well-planned cloud migration strategy that combines private and public cloud solutions.

Planning for long-term resilience

Here is where the education sector varies from the rest of the economy. Critical services like e-learning and the capacity to submit coursework must be available at all times for educational platforms to remain active and accessible. Work in higher education, in particular, never sleeps and is frequently a 24-hour endeavor, especially when it comes to deadlines and last-minute submissions. Universities and other educational institutions may prepare for the long term instead of worrying about investing in new hardware by eliminating the requirement for on-premise infrastructure and shifting to a more dependable cloud-management environment.

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