How the Right MIBS Partner Can Help Your K-12 District Realize Your Networking Dreams

Strategically manage downtime, plus maximize your district’s “return on instruction” 

You understandably have a goal to maximize the uptime in your district’s classrooms so your students can benefit from the best “return on instruction” ROI. So, planning any kind of network work involves strategically managing the downtime. It’s why so many K-12 school network projects are executed over the summer or during planned breaks.  

Your MIBS partner though can sit down with you to assess whether that’s the right time for upgrades and refreshes—or if it may work to start in the summer, then work in phases through the school year so you get the best assessment of your loads and usage.  

Again, they’ll also be able to work with you to create a consistent maintenance schedule and stay on top of it, so any unplanned downtime is minimized as well.  

Reduce risk, and increase budget predictability, while cost-effectively supporting your technology staff  

Post-pandemic, technology staff is still feeling stretched thin, especially if you’re running IT on with a one- or two-person team. A MIBS partner will co-design services agreement for your networking needs—or any other IT service needs. They’ll step in alongside you or your IT team to provide expert support where it’s needed most.  

Plus, not only can that agreement scale up and down as you need it to, but you’ll also be making one monthly payment for their services.  

In doing this, you can shift much of your district’s IT budget to an operational expense, all but eliminating large capital expenses and incremental costs.  

As a result, you can execute projects large and small while gaining predictable pricing and reduced overall IT costs.  

Manage vendor and manufacturer relationships 

One common issue we see across our customers, across industries, is simply not being aware of all the steps that are required to resolve a complaint with a vendor or manufacturer. If you’ve had trouble in the past, or feel like you could use help in this area, a qualified MSP or MIBS can often help: we work with vendors and manufacturers day-in and day-out, for dozens of different customers, and will be able to help guide you through the steps for success. 

Create a plan for ongoing, proactive network maintenance 

Just as it may be difficult to find the time to plan for network upgrades, it may be equally difficult to make time for a proactive maintenance cadence. Yet you also likely know all the downsides of foregoing ongoing maintenance: from downtime in your classrooms to vulnerability to compliance issues, data loss, and cyber-attacks, proactive network maintenance is just as important as device selection and purchasing. 

A MIBS or MSP partner can help you plan an optimal maintenance cadence, and then, slot in alongside your IT staff to take care of it as it’s scheduled—helping provide relief for their workload while still ensuring every update, cleaning, and maintenance task is taken care of and documented. 

You’ll nearly always have something pressing that sees routine maintenance work get pushed to the back burner. We get it. Just as the saying goes, though, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To prevent the worst consequences, the best network maintenance is ongoing and proactive and must fit in alongside your other priorities.  

We’ve built a checklist—How to Proactively Manage Your Network Maintenance—to help you outline and prioritize the key items that should be part of a proactive, consistent network maintenance cadence. It’s also representative of the high-level duties a MIBS or MSP partner can help your district plan for, and execute in the background, so your district is always protected from the many, preventable issues that arise when maintenance is put aside.