Network Management for K-12 Schools

K-12 Education systems have some unique needs when it comes to managing DNS, DHCP, and IP address schemas. We recently spoke with our customer Farmington Municipal Schools to hear more about the challenges and opportunities they're encountering this year.

Consistency In and Out of the Classroom

Consistency is a running theme throughout many of these blogs, because it's just so important. Consistency in processes and technology is the key to operational simplicity. As K-12 education begins to look more like the Enterprise, or maybe it's that Enterprise is starting to look like K-12. Either way, K-12 school systems are dealing with multiple sites, more devices than ever, and not necessarily gaining more help on their IT teams.

The average school district size looks a little like this according to NCES:

• City: 588 students
• Suburban: 654 students
• Town: 444 students
• Rural: 368 students

However a study by NCES in 2018, the largest school district in the US, New York City, has almost one million students enrolled. This doesn't even consider faculty and staff IT needs.

A few suggestions to create more consistent environments are:

• Use the same OS for your end user devices
• Use the same OS for your servers where possible
• Create a single source of truth IPAM which will help you identify outliers and build in documentation
• Start using automation to prevent and check for unwanted configurations
• Use network and scope templates

So creating a consistent environment everyone can jump in to help maintain and troubleshoot, hopefully with a minimal amount of energy, is absolutely necessary in order to make time for necessary efforts like physical and cyber security within those school.

The Most Important Need - Physical Security

As the need for physical security at schools reaches its peak, IT departments are keen to do everything they can to keep their students, faculty, and staff safe. This includes the deployment and maintenance of assets like ID scanners, security cameras, and automated door locks.

Anyone who's been in charge of asset deployment and management will tell you that any time you can automate that deployment and build-in documentation, the more dependable your information and environment is going to be. Creating DHCP scope templates for these assets and requiring information like location, ownership, and version to be recorded during deployment and modification processes are going to help keep your environment secure and simpler to manage.

Easily Share Information

When environments grow more complex, but we maintain the same amount of people to manage that, we have to break down silos and make it possible to set everyone up for success. This requires more than you think. Yes, it's having good documentation. Without documentation people won't be able to make informed decisions or troubleshoot easily during a situation when someone is out sick or on vacation.

Another important part of this is to ensure everyone has the proper access to maintain and troubleshoot their networks. Using solutions which give you granular access using Microsoft Active Directory Users and Groups is going to be a game changer for school systems. Many school systems will simply choose to use native DNS and DHCP services offered from Microsoft and BIND as well. But these native services alone won't give you the granular permissions necessary to prevent accidental human error issues. Using a DDI solution which offers these granular permissions, especially without having to give write access to a domain controller, will be important.

Deployment Times and Learning Curves Matter

Back to the point about making time for more important things, if it takes weeks or months to deploy a new network management solution, that means you don't have time for things like new automation or security practices. Using an non-disruptive overlay solution will save you time and migration administrative costs. Non-disruptive means you can try out a software solution without altering your environment. This is very important for DNS and DHCP because it means you don't have to login to every single device you own and change the DHCP or DNS target server information. An overlay solution will simply connect directly to your DHCP and DNS services and pull the information from there.

Find Out for Yourself

Micetro is a solution that fits the bill for K-12 school systems. It's a DDI overlay solution which will help you accomplish your IT initiatives in a way and at a pace that's appropriate for your entire IT team. With a deployment time of under and hour and a footprint that you can test using a single VM, we'd love for you to see it for yourself. Check out our Free Trial here and let us know if you have any questions!