Case Study: Southwest MiTech achieves scalable, secure, and cost-saving cloud migration for KRESA school districts with Amazon Web Services

Five Lessons Learned by an Education Service Agency Migrating School Districts to AWS

Southwest MiTech, the IT support consortium of Kalamazoo Regional Education Service Agency (KRESA), supports technology for KRESA and the districts it serves. Faced with tight budgets, stricter security and compliance demands, and the need to scale infrastructure and provide disaster recovery, the team needed a solution that would cut costs, reduce administrative overhead, and meet growing performance and reliability requirements.

They evaluated cloud options and chose AWS, securing administrative buy-in and training, designing for growth across Availability Zones, and creating a migration plan for every virtual machine. The result was a fast, low-disruption migration that served 25,000 students and 5,000 staff, delivered improved reliability and DR, saved the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars and significant IT time, and enabled a cloud-first path for future innovation.

Southwest MiTech

Michael Coats

Infrastructure Manager