How Elastic Cloud improves security and operational efficiency for one of the largest school districts in Canada

Meyer and his team are responsible for managing all devices, user access, and common productivity tools such as email. On the back end, they also manage server storage, networking, backups, and help desk tools.

One of the biggest challenges the IT team faces is consistently providing secure and available technologies to students, teachers, and administrators. When issues arise, the team must conduct a thorough and swift investigation to correctly identify and resolve the root cause. In the past, they were often reactive instead of proactive as at least one team member had to check multiple systems to diagnose an issue, and each incident could take two to three hours to resolve. For a lean team, it was a significant drain on resources and reduced the time available to improve services for the district.

Meyer and his team researched the market for a solution and became engaged with Elastic's strong user community. They selected Elastic to streamline incident diagnosis and help protect school systems.

CCSD runs its Elastic environment on Elastic Cloud on AWS to improve operational efficiency and eliminate risks from severe weather events and other threats to on-premise deployments. In the past, the organization’s on-premise data center nearly experienced serious damage during a severe flood.

"Luckily, we didn't lose power, but we came close to a major incident. It encouraged us to find cloud-based alternatives wherever possible. Elastic showed us how easy it is to migrate to Elastic Cloud and we made the move without hesitation," says Meyer.

Working with a cloud-based solution also simplifies financial planning.

CCSD's configuration ingests data through Elastic's data processing pipeline that ingests and transforms logs from multiple sources, including the organization's security systems, before sending them to the built-in search and analytics engine. Data visualization dashboards in Elastic also plays a key role by helping the CCSD's technicians easily monitor systems and identify the root cause of a problem so that it can be fixed quickly.

With Elastic in place, the IT team developed a 'single pane of glass' management console that collects all information about an end-user from the Elastic database.

This result has had a positive impact on students and teachers. If a teacher experiences technical issues at the start of an hour-long lesson, they can be back on track in minutes instead of having to recalibrate the entire period. Security issues can also be addressed with minimum disruption, ensuring that students and teachers can study and teach in a protected environment.

The IT department benefits enormously from Elastic's flexible support packages. "Relationships are key for Calgary Catholic. We're a small team so we don't have a lot of time to be changing relationships and moving to new platforms quickly. When we make decisions we focus on the long term and pick really good partners – and that's what Elastic has proven to be so far. Our account manager has been a big part of that too. He's always on the ball responding to me and my team and getting us answers quickly," says Meyer.

He recalls one incident where the account manager immediately set up a call with an Elastic engineer. "The engineer walked our team through the issue and helped them fine-tune our Elastic environment. The fact that we can get assistance so quickly saves us considerable resources in the long run," says Meyer.

In the future, Meyer sees enormous potential to connect more of the organization's systems to the Elastic database. The more that are connected, the greater the potential for the IT team to proactively manage the learning environment and business systems.