Why a Backup Plan Belongs in Every Institution's Toolkit

In May 2026, Canvas went down. A cybersecurity incident disrupted roughly 9,000 universities, colleges, and K–12 schools, locking instructors and students out of course materials, assignments, announcements, and communications during one of the busiest stretches of the term. Canvas was eventually restored, but the days in between exposed something uncomfortable that many institutions had never tested.

In a thoughtful opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed, Lisa Anderson and Mairéad Martin of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign described what their faculty discovered. Many instructors, veterans of the pandemic-era pivot to online learning, knew how to improvise assignments and shift timelines. What stopped them was something more basic: when they went to notify students, a lot of them had no reliable way to reach their classes. Some couldn't pull a course roster outside Canvas. Others had never built a communication pathway beyond LMS announcements. The teaching expertise was there. The access to their own data was not.

That gap is worth sitting with, because it reframes what "contingency planning" actually means.

Resilience isn't more software. It's independent access to your data.

The authors make a point that's easy to miss in a vendor-heavy industry: the answer to an outage usually isn't bolting on another platform. Running multiple LMS systems for redundancy sounds prudent, but it multiplies training, integration, security oversight, and points of failure. During a crisis, complexity tends to become a liability, not a safety net.

What they advocate instead is quieter and more durable: make sure faculty and administrators can get to the information they need even when the core system is unavailable. Downloadable rosters. Locally stored grade records. Offline assignment options. The unglamorous infrastructure that lets technology, in their words, fail with grace.

This is exactly the space a backup solution occupies, and it's why backup and a second LMS are not the same conversation. A backup doesn't add another login for your community to learn. It quietly preserves your institutional data in a place you control, so an outage at the platform level doesn't become an access blackout for the people who depend on it.

What "having a backup" looks like in practice

At K16 Solutions, this is the problem our Canvas Backup approach is built to solve. It pairs two capabilities so you're covered across both the live and the historical picture of your Canvas environment.

Scaffold DataX provides up-to-the-minute retrieval of Canvas events into a secure warehouse, so your current data stays reachable even when Canvas itself isn't. Scaffold Archiving for Canvas preserves historical course content, student data, and digital files for long-term access and compliance. Notably, it captures the digital file content that Canvas CD2 leaves out, so the materials faculty actually rely on aren't quietly missing from your records.

Together, they give teaching, learning, and administrative workflows somewhere to stand when the primary system stumbles. That's the practical version of the resilience Anderson and Martin describe: not a parallel universe to maintain, but a dependable copy of what matters, ready when you need it.

The takeaway

Outages, cloud disruptions, and security incidents are now part of the operating reality of digital education. You can't eliminate that risk, but you can decide in advance whether a disruption becomes a brief inconvenience or a scramble to reach your own students.

The institutions that came through May best weren't necessarily the ones with the most technology. They were the ones who could still get to their data when it counted. A backup plan is how you make sure you're in that group next time.