Case Study: Lake Washington School District achieves cost savings and simplified backups with Microsoft Azure

School district develops hybrid cloud solution to cut costs, simplify backup

Lake Washington School District (LWSD), a K–12 district serving 29,000 students across 53 schools east of Seattle, faced the dual challenge of supporting a rapid shift to mobile, individualized learning while managing aging, costly on‑premises backup infrastructure. As teachers and students adopted cloud‑based SaaS tools and Office 365, LWSD needed a more scalable, reliable, and budget‑friendly way to protect growing volumes of data—its tape backup system was time‑consuming, error‑prone, and would have required more than $200,000 to replace.

LWSD implemented a hybrid cloud storage solution using Microsoft Azure StorSimple, OneDrive for Business, and other Azure services, keeping active data on‑premises and archiving long‑term data to the cloud. The district eliminated the tape system, saved about $200,000, reclaimed several staff hours per week by removing nightly backup chores, and gained stronger disaster protection through Azure geo‑replication and continuous snapshots; it is now moving additional services (SSO, SQL databases, VMs) to Azure to further simplify IT.

Lake Washington School District

Sally Askman

Director, Technology Operations