Case Study:
SchoolGrid – SaaS Cloud Platform
Schoolgrid
The Client
Overview
SchoolGrid is a SaaS provider serving the UK education sector. Their multi-tenant platform is used by schools to manage parent engagement, communications, and operational workflows — including modules such as ParentGrid, MenuGrid, SelfExpress, and KitchenGrid (suggesting a focus on cashless catering, meal ordering, and school-to-parent communications). As a business-critical service handling sensitive data for schools and families, SchoolGrid sits in a sector where trust, data protection, and uptime are non-negotiable.
The Challenge
As adoption of the SchoolGrid platform grew, the existing cloud setup needed to mature to keep pace. Specifically, SchoolGrid required a cloud environment that could:
- Support a multi-tenant SaaS application used across many schools
- Handle sensitive pupil, parent, and school data securely
- Scale reliably as customer numbers and usage demands grew
- Deliver high availability and resilience for a business-critical service
- Provide clear governance and operational guardrails to manage cost and risk predictably
In short, SchoolGrid needed to move from “it works” to a properly engineered, defensible SaaS foundation.
The Solution
LA NET designed and built a secure Azure platform aligned with modern SaaS and cloud best practices, working closely with SchoolGrid throughout. Architecturally, the solution combined Azure Web Apps for scalable, resilient hosting of the application tier; secure compute via Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Container Registry; and an Azure Landing Zone providing governance, identity, operating model foundations, and policy enforcement. Networking was hardened using NAT Gateways, Private Endpoints, and Application Gateways with Web Application Firewalls to protect customer data and service availability.
Alongside the architecture, LA NET introduced standardised deployment patterns for repeatability, governance and cost controls for predictable growth and financial visibility, and operational readiness practices so the platform could be managed efficiently as usage scaled.
The Outcome
The engagement delivered a secure, scalable Azure platform purpose-built for SchoolGrid’s SaaS model, with a security posture validated against the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark. Headline outcomes were:
- Improved service resilience and reliability for schools and end users
- Confidence to scale as customer adoption increased
- A strong technical foundation for ongoing product development
- Clearer operational and cost visibility as the platform matured
- Freedom for the SchoolGrid team to focus on product innovation and customer experience, rather than firefighting infrastructure
“As SchoolGrid continued to grow, LA NET helped us put the right cloud foundations in place. Their practical approach gave us confidence in the security, resilience, and scalability of the platform, and they clearly understood what we needed as a SaaS provider.”