When stay-at-home orders and physical distancing were implemented earlier this year, many schools scrambled to transition to remote learning. But not the Academy of Our Lady of Peace, where I serve as technology director.

The academy — the oldest high school in San Diego and the only all-girls school south of Los Angeles — already had technology in place that enabled us to seamlessly pivot to online instruction. We had zero downtime, and our 750 students didn’t miss a single day of learning.

One reason for our success was that we were already fully in a cloud environment. We began the transition to cloud-based solutions a few years ago when our Microsoft Exchange Server reached its end-of-life status. Instead of automatically investing in a new onsite server, we moved forward with G Suite for Education because of its intuitive interface and robust back-end administrative capabilities.