DRAFT and IN PROGRESS
The Managed Service Provider (MSP) SIG had 3 goals:
Define pain points that Managed Providers experience in implementing Ed-Fi technology and making it available to community members as productized offerings.
Provide input into and feedback on the Alliance’s products and roadmap especially as it relates to deployment, automation, security, management, and other priority concerns.
Discuss ideas and opportunities to unblock managed providers in ways that help them scale their offerings.
These were the outcomes of the SIG from these goals are:
1.) Managed Service Providers Need Automation Technology and Approaches to Reach Scale
Managed Service Providers were consistent in endorsing automation technology and approaches for their organizations to effectively reach scale. MSPs use automation for many aspects of their core IT operations and in numerous facets such as deployments, configuration, system health checks and security scans. Automation, paired with flexible, on-demand resources from cloud providers (Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform), allow MSPs to accommodate demand in ways that traditional on-premise installations would be limited.
Members from the MSP SIG both prompted new updates to the Ed-Fi roadmap, such as the Admin API and Single-Sign On for Ed-Fi Tools, which was designed and reviewed as part of the SIG. The Admin API is a new product on the Ed-Fi roadmap which will allow for the management of the Ed-Fi ODS/API platform via API interfaces, which can only be done via system scripting tasks or user interfaces like Admin App. The SIG confirmed that today's approaches are burden to deploying Ed-Fi solutions and API-based approaches are preferred. Single-Sign On requests led to the roadmap additions of support for OpenID Connect as an additional authorization strategy, which is preferred in cloud and MSP-solutions to integrate with existing identity stores in those environments.
Also within this SIG, MSP members shared their best practices and internal projects for solutions for Ed-Fi automation, which was helpful to review both for MSP group practice share and to confirm roadmap deliverables.
From these conversations in the SIG (and related in-person meetings like Tech Congress), Ed-Fi is well positioned to continue to listen and receive feedback from the active MSP community, both for adoption of deliverables from the roadmap and continued feedback into valuable roadmap deliverables.
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3.) Ed-Fi Can Improve on Security Outreach and Coordination with MSP Community
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