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Education

IT that holds up for students, staff and a small IT team

Education IT services cover the infrastructure, backup, disaster recovery and security that keep a school district or college running for students and staff. Storcom designs, deploys and manages these systems for K-12 districts and higher education institutions with lean IT teams, including hosted disaster recovery, colocation and managed security planned around the school budget cycle.

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What we hear from education IT teams

  • A small team running a large footprint

    A handful of IT staff often support thousands of devices, several buildings and every classroom application. Little time is left for backup testing, patching or DR planning.

  • Budgets that move on the school calendar

    Purchases follow fiscal years, board approvals and, for network and connectivity projects, E-Rate funding windows. A refresh that misses its window can wait another year.

  • Student data with real obligations

    FERPA governs who can see student education records, and CIPA ties internet filtering to E-Rate discounts. Both depend on access controls and network policies someone has to maintain.

  • Learning that happens off campus

    Remote and hybrid learning made access from anywhere an everyday expectation for students and staff. An outage on a school night is now a classroom outage.

  • Hardware in a single building

    Servers and storage in one district office or server room leave no recovery site if that building loses power, cooling or its network connection.

Services districts and colleges use most

  • Hosted disaster recovery

    Replicate critical servers to a recovery environment we manage, with a documented runbook and scheduled failover tests.

  • Colocation

    Move production or DR hardware out of a school building and into a professionally run data center, so one building’s outage doesn’t take everything down.

  • Microsoft 365 backup

    Retention and point-in-time restore for staff and student mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams.

  • Managed firewall and network

    Firewall policies, content filtering and switching monitored and maintained with 24×7×365 support.

  • Infrastructure refresh

    Hyperconverged, server and storage refreshes sized to your applications and enrollment, with procurement timed to your budget.

Could your district recover from ransomware next week?

If you can’t check every line, a discovery call is the place to talk through the gaps.

  • At least one backup copy is immutable or offline, out of reach of admin credentials
  • Someone has restored a full server from backup in the past year
  • Student information, finance and phone systems have a written recovery order and target recovery time
  • A second site exists if the main server room or data center goes dark
  • Microsoft 365 mail, files and Teams data are backed up outside Microsoft’s built-in retention
  • Internet-facing systems have been scanned for vulnerabilities recently
  • Firewall rules and filtering policies are documented and reviewed

Planning around the school year

  1. Discover

    A discovery call about your environment, your budget cycle and what worries you. No cost and no commitment.

  2. Design to the budget cycle

    We map the roadmap to your fiscal year, board calendar and any E-Rate funding windows, so the design is ready when the money is.

  3. Implement over breaks

    Migrations and cutovers are scheduled for summer, winter break or weekends to keep classrooms running.

  4. Manage year-round

    Monitoring, restore and failover testing and 24×7×365 support, so your team can focus on teachers and students.

Where FERPA and CIPA fit

FERPA requires schools to protect student education records from unauthorized disclosure. CIPA requires schools that receive E-Rate discounts for internet access or internal connections to filter harmful content and keep an internet safety policy.

We design backup, access controls, firewall policies and filtering that support those requirements, and we document how they are configured. Your district still sets the policies and makes the compliance decisions. We make sure the technology does what the policy says.

Case studies

Frequently asked questions

Do you work with school districts in Illinois?

Yes. Storcom is based in Geneva, Illinois, and has provided managed services, disaster recovery and colocation for a large Illinois charter school district. We work with K-12 districts and colleges of different sizes, especially those with small IT teams.

Can you help us plan around E-Rate?

We build the roadmap and procurement timeline around your budget and funding calendar, including E-Rate windows where they apply. Your district or its E-Rate consultant handles applications and eligibility decisions. Our part is making sure the design and quotes are ready when you need them.

What is colocation, and why would a school district use it?

Colocation means placing your own servers and storage in a third-party data center instead of a school building. Districts use it for reliable power, cooling and connectivity, or to create a second site for disaster recovery. You keep ownership of the hardware while the facility handles the physical environment.

We already back up to a server in another building. Is that enough?

It protects against a single failed server, but not always against ransomware or a district-wide outage. If both buildings share the same network, credentials and power, one event can reach both copies. An immutable off-site copy and a tested failover plan close that gap.

How do you protect student and staff data in Microsoft 365?

Microsoft runs the service, but recovering deleted or encrypted mail, files and Teams data is largely your responsibility. We back up Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams to separate storage with the retention you choose. You can restore a mailbox, a site or a single folder to a point in time.

Services that fit

Start with a discovery call.

Tell us what you run today, what is changing and what worries you. We listen, ask questions and tell you plainly whether and how we can help. No cost, no commitment.

Book a discovery call

Or call 1 (866) 610-7472

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