But how did we get here?

 

Nearly a decade ago, KRESA was looking to improve the resilience and availability of their datacenter servers and the applications we hosted for our partner districts. After spending significant time reviewing various solutions, we started partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS). At that time, AWS was just starting their internal K12 Education team and sent a team to Kalamazoo to meet with us and discuss our needs. Thus began our partnership.

 

Over the last 8 or so years, that partnership has strengthened, including adding Ingram Micro (tech services and distribution) and Veeam (backup and replication solution) as additional strategic partners. In that time, KRESA partnered with and supported Ottawa Area ISD, Kalamazoo Public Library, the Michigan DataHub, and over a dozen statewide applications developed by MAISA and the Michigan Collaboration Hub (MiCH).

 

Based on the innovative work KRESA was doing, Mike Coats, now the MiCloud Executive Director, was selected by AWS for their initial AWS Education Champions cohort in 2022. Now, MiCloud is able to bring its skills and experience to the rest of the state! Any ISD or public school entity can qualify for hosting and services through MiCloud, whether it's getting their daily data backups into the cloud or migrating their aging datacenters to cloud services.