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Monroe Public Schools outlines network upgrades, backups and cybersecurity posture
Summary
Technology staff said the district is refreshing firewalls, wireless and servers through E-rate projects, uses CrowdStrike for endpoint protection and replicates data nightly to an off-site location with immutable backups to reduce ransomware risk.
District IT staff briefed the board on network and security priorities, E-rate timing and disaster-recovery options.
Kevin Hauser described the district’s network topology—access points in classrooms, switches, physical servers for storage and virtual servers for services—and said the board-approved E-rate application has been submitted and is under federal review, with decisions expected by July. He noted coverage aims include access points in every classroom and redundant fiber paths to several buildings.
On cybersecurity, Dave Payne said district controls include endpoint protection through CrowdStrike and a layered backup regime: "all of our data is instantaneously replicated to the high school. Every evening, it's backed up to the high school. And then every evening, it's also backed up off-site to, Grand Rapids where there's immutable backups that cannot be altered." Payne and Hauser discussed vendor-assisted disaster recovery options to spin up servers if needed and said fully pre-provisioned hot sites would be costly; they said insurance and vendor arrangements could cover some costs for rapid recovery.
Staff identified two physical servers that need urgent replacement—a failing on-site backup server and a tier-2 storage server for shared district files—and said a larger data-center refresh is planned for the following year.
