CPS Perspective on the Cloud

Lachlan Tidmarsh Chicago Public Schools

Our Historical Perspective

We build or install it and we own it.

A data center 30 feet from my office.

Everything built and run in house on our servers. If an application cant be installed and run on a big, black Dell PC we dont want to use it.

The Shift to Cloud CPS Perspective

Commodity services belong in the cloud
HR/Payroll Finance Systems Email/Collaboration Student facing educational content

Proprietary or specialized services do not

Core Student Records All Student and Program Data Web Services

Moving Away from the Data Center

What the traditional data center is and has been is changing From:
We own the box in which our servers sit Power, cooling, space and redundancy is our problem

To:

We should only care about the servers for proprietary stuff We shouldnt care about: The box in which they sit If the boxes in which they sit are in totally different locations The servers for commodity products

Our core competency should not be power or cooling; it should be:

Knowledge of our proprietary applications Availability and quality of service of our commodity applications

Accomplishments to Date
Applications:

Google @ CPS - 270,000 accounts migrated in less than 5 months in 2012, 4m+ documents created in the first 15 months of use. HCM Oracle Managed Cloud Services contract signed and moving, deploy 1/2015. Cloud-based Talent Acquisition Taleo, deploy 6/2014. Cloud-based Teacher Evaluations True North Logic, deployed 9/2013. EBS Evaluation of Managed Services Environment
RFP for a co-located data center in the Chicagoland area Initial discussions on sharing City facilities Significant migration to disk based DR and real time data replication Stated position to sunset Sharepoint and move off the platform

Infrastructure

Risk and Issues To Date

This has not been a smooth ride to date:
Google - a great suite of products, not yet a great service or overall solution Security and integration remains a challenge and a risk across the board Hundreds of options for cloud based educational content, program participation and assessment Quality, performance at scale and enterprise level integration remains a big hurdle. Quality appears optional at this point in many of the products and vendors we deal with
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