Gibraltar is currently on track to save 25 percent over the typical 5 year lifespan of an on-premises infrastructure. The district gained immediate energy savings by turning off several of the old servers. It is also reducing time to market and service costs by relying on Amazon Premium Support for assistance instead of contracting outside help. Taking a more traditional hardware-based approach would have taken three to four days. In contrast, the district had AWS running within 20 minutes, and fully configured and operational within six hours.

“To the best of our knowledge, we are the first public school in Wisconsin to make the switch from buying servers as hardware to hosting data in the cloud,” Minten says. “We’re saving 25 percent over the next 5 years—it’s had a huge impact on our district’s budget.”

With both of these systems in place, the district is now identifying additional workloads to transfer to AWS, including an email server, Windows Update Service, web filtering, print server, domain backup systems, file storage, security systems and Wi-Fi management.

The district is also planning to move its Skyward student management system to AWS. Because the majority of Wisconsin public school districts use Skyward, Minten wants to show other communities that cloud migration is both technically and financially viable.