Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. MiCloud's grant funding from the Michigan Department of Education (Section 12c Consolidation Grant, $31.6M) covers backup, server hosting, migration, professional services, and training. There are no invoices or costs for Michigan public school entities. The one exception is Managed Services, which are offered separately as a paid service.

Any Michigan public school entity:

• Michigan ISDs and ESAs (all 56)
• Michigan Public Schools (540+ districts)
• Michigan Public School Academies (PSAs)

The MDE Section 12c Consolidation Grant covers:

• AWS cloud hosting and infrastructure
• Veeam backup and replication licensing
• CubeBackup for M365 and Google Workspace
• Server migration professional services
• Training days, webinars, and workshops
• Security architecture and monitoring setup
• Cloud strategy consulting

Not covered by grant: Ongoing Managed Services (Server monitoring & patching, Managed backups, Managed Domains) — these are available as a paid service at K-12-friendly pricing.

The MDE Section 12c Consolidation Grant funding runs through the 2027-28 school year. Districts should take advantage of grant-funded services — including migration, backup setup, and training — while funding is available.

Managed Services include ongoing day-to-day management of your cloud environment — infrastructure monitoring and alerting, automated security patching, fully-managed backups, and management of your domain and public DNS. These are operational costs that continue indefinitely after initial setup, which is why they are offered as a separate paid service rather than covered by the time-limited grant. Pricing is designed to be affordable for K-12 budgets. Contact us for details.

Currently, MiCloud offers AWS-based infrastructure solutions and support. We may include Azure or GCP options in the future, but our deepest expertise and grant funding are currently focused on AWS.

We provide licensing for two backup solutions:

• Veeam — for on-premise servers and AWS-hosted infrastructure backup and replication
• CubeBackup — for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace data backup

Both are provided at no cost to your district through MiCloud's grant funding and partnerships.

While we can only provide licensing for Veeam or CubeBackup, if your current backup solution supports Amazon S3 as a storage target, we can still provide grant-funded cloud storage for your district's backups at no cost to your district. We just can't cover the licensing.

MiCloud is not really a vendor in the traditional sense. We are run under Kalamazoo RESA, a fellow Michigan ISD. We've been building cloud infrastructure for K-12 schools since 2017 and understand the education environment, budget constraints, and compliance needs that commercial providers don't. Plus, our services are grant-funded at no cost to the district.

Simply reach out through our Get Started page. We'll schedule a friendly conversation to understand your needs — no pressure, no sales pitch. Just two education tech teams talking about how we can help.

We work closely with you to create a customized migration strategy. We can do as little or as much as you need — from a basic environment setup with guided self-migration, all the way to a full-service migration where we handle everything. You choose the level of support that works for your team.

It depends on what you need:

• Cloud backups — Typically a quick kickoff meeting to set expectations and a couple hours to implement.
• M365/Google Workspace backup — Typically a quick kickoff meeting to set expectations and an hour or so to implement.
• Full datacenter migration — Migrations are more complicated and usually takes 2-4 weeks from start to finish, but don't worry, we do the vast majority of the work and a good chunk of that time is letting data replicate.

Ultimately, we work on YOUR timeline — there's no rush, and we plan around your school calendar.

Your data is stored in Amazon's Ohio Region using 3 different redundant Availability Zones to ensure the more resiliency for your infrastructure. AWS infrastructure meets rigorous compliance standards including SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001, and FERPA requirements for educational data.

Yes. AWS infrastructure is FERPA-eligible, and MiCloud implements security best practices including encryption at rest and in transit, access controls, and monitoring. We also help districts configure their environments to meet compliance requirements.

• AWS responsibility ("Security of the Cloud"): AWS protects the infrastructure — hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run cloud services.
• Customer responsibility ("Security in the Cloud"): The district is responsible for securing resources used — OS configuration, security patches, application software, and service configuration (security groups, S3 buckets, etc.).

MiCloud helps you manage your side of this model through both setup and ongoing managed services.

Not at all. Think of us as extending your bench — adding cloud expertise where your team may not have it yet. We help with project work, train your existing staff, and offer ongoing support. We can also handle managed services to free up your team's time for other priorities.

For districts with Managed Services: 5-day-a-week support via help desk ticket submissions through our web-based support portal. For all partner districts: access to training, documentation, and consulting during and after project engagements.

Absolutely! Training is one of our core grant-funded services. We offer in-person AWS Training Days hosted at ISDs across the state, virtual webinars, hands-on lab environments, and one-on-one mentoring. We want your team to feel confident managing cloud resources.

The original grant's purpose was primarily about getting backups immutably into the cloud and modernizing and migrating aging datacenters to the cloud - mostly traditional infrastructure. The Innovation & Modernization Fund provides additional funding for districts pursuing innovative technology projects that align with MiCloud's mission that fall outside of that "traditional server infrastructure" category. Learn more about the Innovation & Modernization Fund →

Districts can apply through our application process. Visit the Innovation & Modernization Fund page for eligibility requirements, application timeline, and details on what types of projects qualify.