With the COVID-19 pandemic having forced many educational institutions to digitalize heavily via cloud computing, AI is the new marketing excuse
For educational institutions that have relied on cloud-based productivity solutions for years, a tide of sales policy changes is necessitating a revisiting of cloud service contracts.
Google ended free unlimited storage back in 2022, and in January this year, Microsoft rolled out significant changes to its Microsoft 365 Education plans. This includes retiring the Office 365 A1 Plus plan, reducing storage pools to 100TB per tenant, and restricting some licenses to web-only applications without their counterpart desktop versions, including Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
Some cloud service providers have justified price hikes due to the inclusion of new AI features, and this could be a justifiable upgrade, especially in the education industry. Where certain AI features are deemed as non-relevant, educational institutions can negotiate to opt-out of paying, and/or switch plans. Additionally, while policy changes by major SaaS providers could affect some educational institutions’ digital transformation options in the short term, various pathways are available to ensure continuity of service. Schools can switch vendors; diversify reliance across more vendors; develop hybrid cloud or multi-cloud infrastructure, or form consortia to leverage collective bargaining.
According to Rex Huang, Application Director, Synology, price hikes may push educational institutions towards higher-cost paid plans (not always desirable) or reallocate resources (possibly disruptive) to maintain functionality. “Beyond financial implications, there are also rising concerns over data privacy and compliance. Educational institutions manage high loads of sensitive information such as student records, financial data, and research. This makes them prime targets of cyberattacks. Furthermore, compliance with regulations such as FERPA and GDPR requires secure, private, and auditable data management practices, which some Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions may struggle to meet,” asserted Huang. He noted another option available to educators: on-premises productivity solutions, which are not so prone to “subscription price hikes and unpredictable removals (of) their service features”.
Regardless of the SaaS alternatives that educational institutions that are truly digitalized can pivot to, IT administrators will need to emphasize cybersecurity, data privacy, system reliability/resilience, as well as long term maintainability and sustainability.
