Is Your Institution One Resignation Away from a Crisis? The Hidden Risk Inside CAMS SIS

Feb 23

There's a question every registrar quietly dreads: What happens to this office if I leave?

Not because they're planning to go anywhere. But because they know the honest answer, and the answer is chaos. Because the way CAMS works — or more accurately, the way it doesn't — means that years of institutional knowledge lives not in the system, but in the person running it.

That's not a people problem. That's a systems problem, and it has a name: Single Point of Failure (SPOF).

When one person's institutional knowledge leaves, that's not a people problem. That's a systems problem.

What Is a Single Point of Failure — and Should the Registrar Lose Sleep Over It?

In IT, a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) is any component of a system that, if it fails, causes the entire system to stop working. In higher ed operations, the SPOF could be a server, a cybersecurity threat, or a software bug. But sometimes, it's a person.

When a Student Information System like CAMS requires deep institutional knowledge to operate — when the workarounds, the report logic, the billing sequences, and the exception handling all live in one staff member's memory — that person becomes your institution's SPOF. It’s not that person’s fault, it’s just the way institutional systems evolve over many years.

And when they leave, retire, or simply take a vacation, the pain is felt immediately.

Why CAMS Creates This Problem (and Why It's Not Your Fault)

CAMS — built on a legacy, non-relational database architecture — was not designed for the operational complexity that today's registrar and admissions offices face. It was built for a different era of higher education, when enrollment was simpler, student pathways were linear, and the same five staff members had been running the office for twenty years.

As you know, that era is over.

Today's registrar offices are managing transfer credit evaluations, non-traditional enrollment patterns, micro-credentials, compliance reporting, and student data requests — often with leaner teams than a decade ago. CAMS documentation is notoriously sparse. Error messages are cryptic. Workarounds are undocumented. And the reporting layer — which often requires direct SQL queries just to pull basic data — is something only a handful of people on your campus actually know how to navigate.

Every fix introduces new risk. How much risk compounds over a decade?

There's a Technical Time Bomb Most CAMS Institutions Are Ignoring

Here's something your IT department already knows, but may not have escalated yet: CAMS only functions in Internet Explorer mode within Microsoft Edge.

That's not a quirk. That's a structural dependency on a browser mode that Microsoft has been actively deprecating. As browser security standards advance and institutions modernize their IT environments, this dependency becomes increasingly untenable. You are — right now, today — one browser update or IT policy change away from your entire SIS becoming inaccessible.

This isn't a hypothetical future problem. It's an active barrier to IT modernization and security compliance happening on campuses right now. And it's one that doesn't get fixed with a patch or a workaround. It's baked into the architecture.

The Market Is Shifting Under Your Feet

The internal risk of a SPOF is real enough on its own. But there's a broader context worth understanding: the legacy SIS market itself is in a period of significant instability.

In January 2026, Gartner published its first-ever Magic Quadrant for Higher Education Student Information System SaaS — the first time the analyst firm has formally mapped this market. Their finding: the SaaS SIS market is in the Trough of Disillusionment, with vendors still struggling to achieve feature parity with legacy systems. The market is fragmented, and consolidation is underway.

Thesis — the company behind CAMS — is classified by Gartner as a Niche Player: a small, privately held subsidiary with a limited install base. And within the CAMS community, it's increasingly clear that Thesis has shifted its focus to its newer product, Elements, leaving CAMS clients on a platform with minimal ongoing development and dwindling support resources. Thesis Elements is widely perceived as a UI refresh rather than a genuine architectural upgrade — the underlying database limitations remain.

Meanwhile, Anthology filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2025 and sold its SIS division to Ellucian — already the dominant player in the market. That's significant consolidation happening fast. And within the PowerCampus community, there is active discussion about Ellucian sunsetting that product as well.

The point isn't to alarm. It's to be honest: institutions that plan their SIS migration on their own timeline are in a very different position than those who are eventually forced into one.

The Real Cost of a CAMS Single Point of Failure

This isn't an abstract risk. Here's what it looks like in practice:

Operational paralysis during transitions. When the person who knows how billing sequences work in CAMS leaves, refund processing slows down. Enrollment holds get applied incorrectly. Financial aid disbursements get delayed. Students feel it immediately.

Compliance exposure. CAMS's non-relational database architecture means that an edit made in one field or screen may not propagate to related data elsewhere in the system. Audit issues arise not from a lack of tracking, but from a system that requires staff to know — without any documentation — that updating one record requires corresponding manual updates somewhere else. When the person who knows those dependencies is gone, your compliance posture goes with them. FERPA, Title IV reporting, accreditation requirements: none of these pause for a transition.

The vacation problem. Ask yourself honestly: can your registrar office fully function when your most experienced CAMS user is out for two weeks? If the answer is "not really," you already have a SPOF.

Onboarding that never really works. Training a new staff member on CAMS isn't just slow — it's often incomplete. There's no system-guided logic. The new hire learns by watching and asking questions. They become dependent on the person training them. The SPOF replicates itself.

A growth ceiling you may not see coming. Higher-volume CAMS institutions experience frequent system crashes during batch processing — peak registration periods, end-of-semester billing cycles. As enrollment grows, system stability becomes increasingly unreliable. The system was built for a simpler era, and it shows when you push it.

What a Modern SIS Does Differently

This is the core shift: a well-implemented modern SIS moves institutional knowledge from people's heads into the system's logic.

When Unity Environmental University moved off CAMS onto Salesforce Education Cloud, one of the outcomes their team noticed was that processes became self-documenting. Audit trails existed natively. Permissions were granular and role-based — not the binary "all or nothing" access model that forces CAMS administrators to choose between operational efficiency and security. Workflows were built into the system, not stored in someone's email drafts folder.

The registrar's office could function…even when someone was out…even when staff changed…even during peak enrollment season when everything was moving fast. Unity scaled from 3,500 students to 10,000+ on the platform — without adding headcount to manage the volume.

That's not a technology story; it’s an operational resilience story.

🔍 Quick audit: Do you have a SPOF at your institution?

Here are three questions worth asking your team this week:

If your most experienced SIS user left tomorrow, how long before operations were materially impacted?
Where does your exception-handling logic actually live — in the system, or in someone's head?
Could a new staff member run your end-of-semester billing cycle independently, using only system documentation?

If the answers make you uncomfortable, you're not alone. Most CAMS institutions are in exactly this position. The good news is that it's solvable — and schools your size have done it in under ten months without blowing up operations in the process.

What to Actually Do About It in 4 Steps

The answer isn't "rip and replace everything immediately." For most institutions, it starts with an honest internal audit — understanding where your risk actually lives before you decide how to address it.

Here's how institutions that have successfully moved off CAMS typically approach it:

Step 1: Map where your institutional knowledge actually lives.

Before you can migrate a system, you need to understand what's in people's heads versus what's in the system. Who are your SPOFs? What processes only work because of tribal knowledge? This isn't a technology exercise — it's an operational one. It usually surfaces faster than people expect, and it's often sobering.

Step 2: Identify your highest-risk dependencies.

Not all SPOFs are equal. Billing sequence logic is a different risk level than report formatting preferences. Compliance-adjacent processes — Title IV, FERBA, accreditation reporting — are where you prioritize first. These are the areas where institutional knowledge walking out the door has immediate legal and financial consequences.

Step 3: Evaluate your path forward with your actual constraints in mind.

Timeline, budget, staff bandwidth, data complexity — these are real factors, not objections. A well-scoped migration accounts for them from the start. The difference between a painful migration and a successful one almost always comes down to whether the implementation was designed around how your team actually works, or whether your team was expected to adapt to a generic implementation plan.

Step 4: Move before the decision is made for you.

The institutions that navigate SIS transitions well are the ones that start the conversation before there's a crisis. Browser deprecation, staff turnover, enrollment growth, vendor uncertainty — any of these can accelerate the timeline in ways that remove your options. The runway matters.

None of this requires a commitment to migrate on day one. It requires an honest look at where you are.

What Moving Off CAMS Actually Looks Like

One of the most common things we hear from registrars considering a migration is: "We know we need to move, but we don't know what that actually looks like."

It's a fair concern. CAMS migrations carry real complexity — data integrity, historical records, reporting continuity, staff retraining. These aren't small things, but they're also not blockers. They're workstreams — and they're manageable when the implementation is built around your people and your process, not just the technology.

Unity Environmental University moved their entire institution off CAMS and onto Salesforce Education Cloud as a full SIS in under ten months. The work wasn't just technical — it was about understanding how their registrar and admissions teams actually worked, and building a system that supported that, rather than forcing the team to accommodate the system.

That's the difference between a migration and a transformation. And given the pace of change in the SIS market right now, the institutions that move on their own terms will have a meaningful advantage over those that wait until the decision is made for them.

What a Modern SIS Does Differently

	CAMS	Salesforce-as-SIS
Permissions model	All-or-nothing (screen level)	✓ Granular, role-based, field level
Audit trail	Manual — staff must know dependencies	✓ Native, automatic
Browser support	IE Mode only	✓ All modern browsers
Vendor roadmap	Deprioritized — focus shifted to Elements	✓ Active development + AI roadmap
Onboarding new staff	Watch and ask — undocumented	✓ System-guided logic