A major warning for higher education cybersecurity governance emerged again as campuses confront cloud accountability: a widely used learning platform incident involving Canvas is being framed as evidence that institutions cannot outsource FERPA responsibility to vendors. The central issue reported is not only immediate liability and potential FERPA exposure, but also a long-standing assumption in higher ed technology planning—treating outsourced infrastructure as outsourced accountability. Educational institutions remain responsible for oversight and governance of educational records even when data is processed by third-party systems. The risk is portrayed as escalating from vendor-specific problems to “digital deferred maintenance,” where institutions accumulate technical and compliance “debt” that becomes visible only when systems fail or regulators intensify scrutiny.