All of Gateway’s and many schools’ data is stored with a few providers, which has several issues.
Almost every account I use for school is linked to my Google account so I can just press “sign in with Google.” That is all well until something goes wrong with Google or your account is compromised. As has been demonstrated when Facebook went down recently, and when Google went down last year, centralization is not smart for reliability.
By depending on large central platforms for everything, companies can and do compel you into contracts.
You cannot edit a Google Doc without a Google account. That means you do not really have a choice in the matter: you will agree to data collection, hand over your data, and use Google’s proprietary software for collaboration.
Bad terms like class action waivers are common: MySchoolBucks, the school-required payment processor includes that. (How can a company handling large amounts of money do that?)
With centralized servers, there is no way for anyone to confirm that the code running on the server is as claimed by the companies providing it. In many decentralized systems, servers that do not play nicely are overridden by ones that do.