For CIOs and IT leadership
A thirty-year decision, examined like one.
An SIS outlives the requirements it was selected against — the systems being replaced today are often older than the staff running them. The architectural question is not which product fits the current spec, but which system survives the demands nobody has written down yet.
The platform underneath
Infrastructure trusted by stricter regulators than ours.
The platform your student record would run on also carries banking, healthcare and government workloads. For a CIO, that fact does more work than any feature list: the security and resilience engineering is set by the most demanding customers on the platform, and every institution runs on the result.
- A security bar set by government workloadsFedRAMP High
- Salesforce Government Cloud Plus is authorized at FedRAMP High and DISA Impact Level 5 — the levels required for sensitive federal and defense workloads. Those authorizations attach to a dedicated government environment; the engineering they demand is platform-wide.
- Public-cloud resilienceHyperforce
- Salesforce’s infrastructure is defined as code on the public cloud, with every region deployed across at least three availability zones and a zero-trust security architecture. Availability engineering at this scale is bought, not built — no education vendor’s data center reproduces it.
- Data residency, by choice
- Hyperforce operates in more than twenty regions worldwide, with customer data kept in-region. For institutions outside the US, student records stay in the jurisdiction that regulates them.
- Operational transparency
- The platform’s live status, performance and maintenance schedule are public at trust.salesforce.com, per instance. Your team can see the health of the system that runs the student record at any moment, directly.
The question is not whether a student system can be trusted to the cloud. Banks, hospital systems and government agencies already answered it — on this platform.
Architecture
Standard levers, and a labor market that knows them.
Our implementations are configuration-first, built with the platform’s standard levers. That is an architectural decision with consequences your team lives with for decades.
- Releases without upgrade projects
- Salesforce ships three platform releases a year, and keeping the platform current is Salesforce’s job rather than a project of yours. A configuration-first implementation leaves releases little to break — institutions take them as they arrive.
- Skills you can hire for
- Configuration first, code where it earns its place — and both are standard Salesforce, the same levers used in every industry the platform serves. What your predecessor built, your successor can read, audit and hire for, from the largest skills market in enterprise software.
- Change without redeployment
- When the operating model shifts or a requirement arrives that nobody wrote down, it is a configuration change rather than a redeployment.
- Both architectures in production
- Our clients run EDA and Education Cloud in production; new implementations build on Education Cloud. Every capability claim on these pages holds on both.
The familiar choice
Purpose-built — for whose purpose?
A packaged SIS promises certainty: a fixed product, a known path. Look at what it delivers. It still arrives as an implementation project with configuration, data migration and change management — and the industry norm for one runs two to three years, against about ten months here. Longer projects cost more and fail more. A packaged system is genuinely purpose-built: for the vendor’s average of every institution it sells to, fixed at design time. Configuration on a platform is how a system ends up built for your institution’s purpose instead.
The integration estate
A smaller map to defend.
When recruiting, admissions, records, advising and student finance share one platform and one record, the integrations between them stop existing. What remains is deliberate, established and live.
- Financial aid
- PowerFAIDS, Regent and Campus Ivy tie the aid chain into the same record as registration and billing.
- Payment gateways
- Student financials live natively on the record, and established gateway integrations take the payments — TouchNet, Nelnet and Transact on campus, Flywire for cross-border tuition in 140+ currencies.
- Transcript and credential networks
- Produced natively, delivered through the networks receiving institutions verify against: the National Student Clearinghouse and Parchment in North America, My eQuals in Australia and New Zealand, MyCreds in Canada.
- LMS and identity
- Established routes to Canvas, Moodle and Brightspace, and native SAML and OpenID Connect federation with Microsoft Entra ID, Okta and Google.
The point is the shape of the estate: fewer systems asserting authority over the same student, fewer nightly reconciliations, fewer places for the truth to fork.
After go-live
Who runs it: your team, or ours.
Several clients staff their own Salesforce administration — the skills market is broad, which is itself an architectural advantage over single-vendor specialists. Others retain us through managed services. Either way the platform is administered, not maintained: there is no vendor release cycle for your roadmap to wait behind.
Insights & events
The technical detail behind this.
Explainer · Oct 18, 2024
What In the Education: Cloud Data Model
What Salesforce means by "the core", why the Education Cloud data model runs to 55 objects, and when that complexity is worth carrying.
Explainer · Oct 18, 2024
What's the Deal with Salesforce OmniStudio in Education Cloud?
OmniStudio is powerful but demanding — who should build on it in Education Cloud, and what everyone else should use instead.
Article · Feb 23, 2026
Is Your Institution One Resignation Away from a Crisis? The Hidden Risk Inside CAMS SIS
When CAMS know-how lives in one staff member's head, the registrar's office is one resignation from crisis. What that risk looks like and how to reduce it.
Start here
Bring your integration map.
A discovery call is a working conversation. Come with your current-state architecture and your registrar — we will tell you candidly whether this is a fit, and what we would not move.