Case Study: Clever achieves scalable growth and robust student-data security with Amazon Web Services

Clever - Customer Case Study

Clever is a fast-growing edtech startup that helps schools sync roster data and simplify logins for K–12 applications, serving tens of thousands of schools and millions of students and teachers. Rapid growth—adding 1,000+ schools per week during peak periods—plus handling highly sensitive student PII and FERPA obligations created a hard requirement for a platform that can scale instantly and keep data secure without disrupting instructional time.

Clever built its platform on AWS, using EC2, RDS, EBS (with encryption), IAM, AWS Certificate Manager, CloudTrail, and CloudWatch to provide scalable compute and storage, strong encryption, identity controls, and continuous monitoring. The result: the company scaled quickly to reach nearly half of U.S. K–12 schools in three years, absorbed seasonal traffic spikes with no compromise to availability or compliance, and avoided the cost and complexity of running its own data centers so it can focus on product and student-data privacy.

Clever

Alex Smolen

Lead Security Engineer