What to Do When Your SIS Vendor Goes Down

When your SIS vendor goes down, whether it is an outage, an acquisition, a shutdown, or a contract gone wrong, your institution does not get to pause. Students still attend, aid still has to disburse, and the Department still expects compliance. The first job is continuity, the second is getting your data out intact, and the third is standing up something that can actually run Title IV. Panic is the enemy; a checklist is the antidote. The video above walks through the rescue path, and the steps below are the playbook.

The hard truth that makes this survivable: your data is yours, and your right to export it is the insurance policy you hope you never need and are very glad to have when you do.

Immediate steps when the system is down or going away

First, stabilize operations on paper or temporary tooling so attendance, the thing your Title IV math depends on, never stops being recorded, even by hand. Second, secure a complete copy of your data immediately while you still have access, before a sunset date or a locked account makes it impossible. Third, identify your compliance deadlines that fall during the gap (disbursements, returns, reporting) and triage them, because the Department's calendar does not move for your vendor's problems. Fourth, communicate to staff and, where needed, students, with facts and a plan rather than silence.

Get your records out, completely

The single most important move is a complete, structured export while access lasts: students, enrollments, the full financial ledger, aid awards and disbursements, attendance, grades and transcripts, and the audit trail, in open formats you can actually rebuild from. A partial or PDF-only dump will not let you run Title IV on the other side. If your current vendor is making this hard, that friction is exactly why an export right matters, and exactly why your next system should make it trivial.

Stand up a system that can run Title IV

Continuity is not just storing the data, it is being able to operate it: compute R2T4 on a withdrawal, enforce SAP before a disbursement, reconcile your aid. The faster you can land your exported records into a system that runs those engines, the shorter your compliance gap. This is where a migration built as a reconciliation, prove the numbers match before you trust them, turns an emergency into a controlled move.

How ApolloSRM is built for this

ApolloSRM treats both directions of the door as a right. Coming in, migration ships with a reconciliation harness that proves your records reproduce your prior system to the penny, so you can land fast without flying blind. Going out, an owner can pull a complete, structured, audited export of every table at any time, so ApolloSRM can never become the vendor you are trapped by. And because the Title IV engines (R2T4, SAP, disbursement gating) run on the live record, "stand up a system that can run Title IV" is a matter of getting your data in, not rebuilding compliance from scratch. The goal is simple: no school should ever be one vendor's bad week away from a compliance crisis.

Frequently asked questions

What should you do first if your SIS goes down?

Stabilize daily operations so critical records, especially attendance, keep being captured even on paper, then secure a complete copy of your data while you still have access, triage any compliance deadlines that fall during the outage, and communicate a clear plan to staff.

How do you maintain Title IV compliance if your SIS is unavailable?

Keep recording attendance and key events manually so no data gap forms, identify disbursement, return, and reporting deadlines in the affected window, and move your exported records into a system that can run R2T4 and SAP as quickly as possible to close the compliance gap.

Can a vendor hold your student data hostage?

Your institution owns its data, and your contract should guarantee export rights, but some vendors add friction. That is why securing a complete, open-format export early, and choosing a next system that makes export trivial, is the practical protection against lock-in.

How fast can you switch SIS platforms in an emergency?

The limiting factor is getting complete data out and reconciled into the new system. With a clean export and a migration built as a reconciliation (proving balances, aid, and rosters match before cutover), the move is measured in a controlled cycle rather than an open-ended scramble.