The last laptop cart has been wheeled back to storage. The help desk tickets have dried up. For education IT teams, this is a significant time of year. It’s the brief window when you can make real changes to your school’s technology infrastructure without disrupting the people who depend on it every day. The halls may be empty, but your to-do list shouldn’t be.
Summer is your shot to tackle network upgrades, cybersecurity testing, hardware refreshes, and the access control cleanup you’ve been deferring since October. The challenge is using that window before it closes. September has a way of arriving while you’re still scoping Phase 2.
Here are some suggestions about where to focus your energies.
Audit and upgrade your network infrastructure
Summer is the time to rip out aging switches. Go ahead, reconfigure those VLANs. How about stress-testing your wireless coverage? It’s a lot easier without a building full of students streaming video between classes. If you’ve been limping through the year on hardware that should have been replaced two budget cycles ago, let’s get busy.
Walk the building with a site survey tool. Identify your dead zones and your bottlenecks. This is also the moment to evaluate whether your bandwidth agreements still match your actual usage patterns, because enrollment shifts and 1:1 device programs have a way of outpacing the contracts you signed.
Refresh and redeploy hardware
Faculty and staff machines that have been accumulating three years of workarounds and duct-tape fixes need a clean slate. Decommission anything past its useful life, and standardize your configurations so you aren’t troubleshooting six different laptop models come fall. If you’re running a device loan or 1:1 program, summer is when you inventory and repair student devices. Do it now or do it in a panic in August.
Upgrade classroom AV systems
Summer lets you replace aging AV equipment and standardize control interfaces across rooms. Take the opportunity to test everything thoroughly, before a professor discovers on the first day of class that the HDMI input doesn’t recognize their laptop. If your institution is moving toward hybrid or HyFlex instruction, this is the time to get recording and streaming hardware installed and tested properly.
Run real cybersecurity testing
During the academic year, your security posture is largely defensive. You’re busy putting out fires as needed. Summer gives you the breathing room to go on offense. Schedule a penetration test. Run a phishing simulation against staff accounts. Review your endpoint detection coverage and make sure your EDR tools are actually deployed across every machine, not just the ones that were online the day you pushed the agent.
Education is one of the most targeted sectors in ransomware attacks. And yet threat actors know that schools tend to be understaffed and under-resourced. There’s no better time to find out where your gaps are than when a thousand students aren’t depending on your network.
Clean up access controls
Somewhere in your Active Directory or identity management platform, there are accounts for employees who left two years ago. Maybe you have service accounts with admin privileges that nobody remembers creating, and shared credentials that violate every policy you’ve written. Summer is the time to audit user access, enforce least-privilege principles, and clean up the permission sprawl that accumulates across an academic year of “just give them access for now.” Pay special attention to accounts with elevated privileges and any third-party integrations that have been granted broad API access to your systems.
Review and test your disaster recovery plan
If your plan hasn’t been tested in the last twelve months? You don’t have a plan. You just have a document.
Summer is when you validate your backup integrity and test your restoration procedures. Make sure your recovery time objectives are actually achievable, given your current resources. Simulate a ransomware scenario. Are your backups truly air-gapped, or just labeled that way? Confirm that your key staff know their roles in a recovery situation and that your communication plan still has the right phone numbers in it.
Evaluate cloud migration opportunities
If you’re still running on-premises infrastructure that’s a candidate for cloud migration, summer provides the low-risk window to plan and execute. Whether you’re moving email, file storage, SIS integrations, or learning management platforms, doing it over the summer means fewer users are affected if something goes sideways. This is also a good time to review your existing cloud spend: are you paying for licenses and capacity you’re not using? On the other hand, are you under-provisioned in ways that will hurt you in the fall?
A quick comment on capacity. The list above is extensive, and most education IT teams are not. If you’re looking at this and thinking that your summer staff can realistically tackle maybe three of these seven priorities, you’re not alone. That’s the math almost every school and university IT department faces.
It’s worth asking if some of these projects would move faster with outside expertise supplementing your team for the summer. A few months of targeted support can mean the difference between starting the fall semester confident and starting it with the same whiteboard full of deferred projects from last year.
If your summer project list is longer than your summer staffing plan, we should talk.