Chairo Christian School’s IT team has a clear view of its role in the school: to help staff, students and families get more from technology.
As the school grew and its technology stack expanded, more of the team’s time was being absorbed by the infrastructure behind those systems. Moving Schoolbox to the cloud became part of a wider strategy to reduce that load, improve reliability and security, and give the team more capacity for the work happening across the school.
What they gained most was time.
“One of the biggest benefits we saw was technician time back.”
Putting IT time back into the school
With Schoolbox Cloud taking care of the infrastructure behind the platform, Chairo’s technicians could spend more time working alongside the people using it.
That could mean helping a staff member set up a page or markbook, showing teachers how to make better use of their devices, supporting students and parents, or moving another school technology project forward.
The difference has been visible to school leadership too. Their feedback has centred less on the technology itself and more on what the IT team is now able to contribute.
For Chairo, that is where the value of moving to the cloud becomes tangible. Technical capacity has been redirected back into supporting the school.
Leaving the infrastructure with the experts
Reliability and security were also important considerations in Chairo’s wider cloud strategy.
The team wanted to reduce the risks associated with outages, lengthy maintenance windows and managing infrastructure for a product they hadn’t built themselves.
Their reasoning was straightforward: Schoolbox knows the platform in detail, so there was value in having the same team manage the environment it runs in.
“It’s built by Schoolbox, it’s hosted by Schoolbox. They know it best, and it frees up our team to better serve our school body.”
For Chairo, that also meant handing over much of the ongoing work around patching, monitoring and security, while reducing the amount of infrastructure the school itself needed to maintain.
Making the costs easier to plan for
Moving to the cloud also changed the way Chairo could think about its technology budget.
The school moved from capital expenditure on hardware towards a more predictable operational cost. Server lifecycles, storage requirements, memory and processing capacity no longer needed to be planned and costed in the same way.
A per-user model also made it easier to understand what the service costs as the school grows.
“We know year-on-year what it looks like. We know what we have to budget per student.”
That predictability gave both IT and school leadership a clearer picture of the ongoing cost, without future hardware replacements sitting somewhere over the horizon.
A migration people barely noticed
Perhaps one of the best measures of Chairo’s cloud migration was how little the wider school community had to think about it.
The technical teams worked through the migration together, scheduled a short maintenance window and moved the school’s data into the new cloud environment.
Then everyone logged back in.
“We really haven’t had a lot [of feedback from users], which has been fantastic, which means the move was seamless… everybody logged in like nothing ever happened.”
The lack of feedback afterwards was a positive sign. Staff, students and families could continue using Schoolbox as they had before, while a substantial change had taken place behind the scenes.
For Chairo, moving Schoolbox to the cloud has brought greater predictability around cost, less infrastructure to manage and more confidence around the service itself.
More importantly, it has given the IT team something every school has a finite amount of: time. And they’re putting that time back into the staff, students and families they’re there to support.
To discuss moving your Schoolbox instance to the cloud, or to find out more about Schoolbox, contact us today.
