The Northeastern Regional Information Center (NERIC) has been recognized as a 2025 AWS Champions Award winner for its successful migration of the SchoolTool Student Information System (SIS) to AWS. This initiative, executed in close collaboration with Mindex, supports more than 80,000 students across school districts in Albany, Schoharie, Schenectady, and southern Saratoga counties. It also marks a significant leap forward in delivering secure, reliable, and scalable educational technology services.

Project Overview
NERIC previously hosted SchoolTool SIS on on-premises infrastructure, requiring intensive management of hardware, manual patching, disaster recovery, and software updates. To align with Mindex’s modernization roadmap and better support school districts, NERIC led a successful migration of all SchoolTool environments to AWS cloud hosting.

The transition was carefully coordinated to minimize downtime, and today, all participating districts are fully operational in the cloud — benefiting from greater performance, availability, security, and ease of maintenance.

Challenges Addressed: Outdated Infrastructure and Operational Overhead
With its legacy system, NERIC faced:

• High resource demands for maintaining physical servers and backups 
• Manual, time-consuming update and patch processes 
• Limited scalability and resilience in supporting multiple districts 
• Security responsibilities that increasingly exceeded internal capabilities 

The AWS migration provided a modern, cloud-native foundation that solved these challenges while enabling continuous improvement.

Results: Reliable Operations and Long-Term Scalability
Since migrating to AWS, NERIC has delivered:

• Improved system performance and uptime for districts 
• Stronger data security using AWS’s managed infrastructure 
• Reduced operational complexity and maintenance effort 
• More seamless delivery of SchoolTool updates and enhancements 
• Successful collaboration between NERIC, Mindex, and school district stakeholders 

This transformation has enabled NERIC to focus on service innovation while supporting districts with a more resilient and future-ready solution.

A Regional Model for Cloud-Powered Student Information Systems
NERIC’s migration of SchoolTool to AWS serves as a compelling example for other regional and state-level education service providers. With careful planning, strong partnerships, and a clear modernization strategy, NERIC has delivered a scalable, secure, and high-performing solution that benefits students, educators, and administrators alike.