Trade-offs in security, performance, and ease of use in centrally hosted student information systems

This piece lays out a number of issues but most clearly hits the tradeoffs between locally and centrally hosted systems. The impact of differing security policies also arises. Differing remote access and password policies actually rob much of the functionality of the system - forcing one district to move to local hosting of the data system. This mismatch in security policy eliminates one of the most important aspects of the system - remote access.

Alignment of policies and a clear understanding of the payoffs and costs at each level of the organization needs to be in the forefront for all of the players throughout the project. This clash of policies and needs should not have been a surprise.

Chris