Every education business is different, with technology needs that span from the extremely complex, to the very simple. But there’s one thing on which providers large and small seem to have a similar position on after the epoch-defining events of 2020: they are ready to move to the cloud.

The education sector is not alone. Around 50% of all corporate data was estimated to be in the cloud in 2020. As a result of the accelerating momentum, Gartner predicts that Australian spending on public cloud services will increase by 18.4% in 2021 to approximately $10.6 billion.

Here’s some of the reasons education businesses are choosing to make the shift in 2021.

Location independence

The cloud enables education businesses, their trainers and their students to access and collaborate on the information they need at any time, from anywhere, on any device. This creates opportunities for managing teams on the go, building training opportunities that are not tied to a specific physical location, as well as creating efficiencies in management through the likes of student portals.

Getting things done

One of the main aims of the cloud is to increase productivity right up and down the breadth of an education provider’s operations. For educators, this means advantages like providing 24/7 student access to speed up and cut the costs of administration, and benefitting from automated workflows and mass actions in real-time that keep everyone within an organisation on the same data page.

Unlocking an ecosystem

Integrations between cloud technologies allow the data within different systems to talk to each other instantly. In the context of education, this means the ability to be creative in the use of data and technology right along the student journey, from integrating student management and learning management systems to building connections with other areas of the business like finance.

Prioritising agility

Educators can scale operations up or down and access upgrades in an agile way without the hinderance of housing physical servers or relying on IT support teams. This could mean flexibly responding to changes in a provider’s workforce or getting your hands on features in real-time that support the roll-out of innovation and the educator’s currency with compliance requirements.

Cutting costs

The cloud changes spending on IT from an upfront capital expenditure to an ongoing operational expenditure. This usually means the subscription costs associated with the cloud are less than an education business would need to spend if they continued doing it all themselves, which in the past would mean paying for servers, IT support, maintenance in addition to hosting and storage.

Staying safe

Cloud service providers are able to deliver much higher levels of data security. Because their business relies on storing and protecting data, they will usually invest more in achieving advanced levels of data security, meaning important information like student data ends up being much safer in the bank vault of the secure cloud rather than stashed under the mattress at home.