Case Study: Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario achieves district-wide reliable connectivity and cloud-based learning with Microsoft Azure

Rural school district takes cloud journey, connects students to the future

The Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario, which serves 13,000 students across 49 schools and 12,000 km² of rural Ontario, had devices and educational technology but suffered from chronically low-bandwidth connections, slow streaming, frequent email problems, and slow, costly on-site IT support. With a moderate, enrollment-tied budget and widely dispersed schools, teachers and students often couldn’t reliably access online lessons or resources.

Beginning in 2013 the board moved to a Microsoft-based hybrid cloud, centralizing websites on Azure and rolling out Office 365 (now used by roughly 15,000 staff and students). The shift delivered rapid disaster recovery, 100x more bandwidth, nearly a petabyte of managed storage, remote IT support, real‑time collaboration (including live digital classroom tours), faster updates, and plans to fully migrate its datacenter—resulting in a far more reliable, connected learning environment and expanded opportunities for students and teachers.

Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario

Ken Konink

ICT Supervisor of Systems