The Indianapolis Public School (IPS) district has moved its IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Covering around 70 schools in Indianapolis, the district underwent the cloud migration as part of its Rebuilding Stronger initiative.

Rebuilding Stronger began in 2021, and has seen the district exit its data center which was housed in an "aging building" in central Indianapolis.

The exact location of the data center has not been shared, but the IPS' headquarters is housed in the John Morton Finney Center for Education Services.

As reported by EdTechMagazine, IPS' director of digital strategy and transformation Chenzira Allen said that the district could not continue to rely on "outdated infrastructure."

“Unable to support the latest security updates, the old data center left us open to security threats, while its storage mechanisms lacked [the] flexibility to scale up in a cost-efficient manner,” said Allen.

Initial discussions surrounded moving to a new data center location, but with limited access to funding, the IPS began looking at a cloud migration possibility.

“The final decision to move to Microsoft Azure came down to fulfilling our overall goal, which was to reduce the burden on our IT team, and open opportunities and possibilities while remaining fiscally sound,” said Allen.

“With the ever-changing landscape of American education to consider, this migration provides us with much-needed computing power and storage. It allows us to provide solutions that capture the profound impact modern technology can have on education.”

Thus far, IPS has migrated close to 95 percent of its applications to the cloud, with help from IT firm CDW. In total, the district spent two years planning and accessing the applications that would need to be moved, and conducted the migration during the last summer holidays.