Neglecting the Edge in Higher Education
During recent discussions with a number of IT decisionmakers across the higher education landscape, an interesting trend emerged.
Higher Ed & K-12 Cyber Protection & Provisioning Needs
K-12 school districts and higher education institutions face two primary cyber challenges: those resulting from IT inefficiencies and those posed by data security threats. First up, inefficiencies. America’s public education institutions must often make due with limited IT staffs and budgets, leading to vulnerability and lost productivity. Nowhere is this more visible than in schools’ outdated system provisioning methods, which require individual machine imaging at painstakingly slow speeds for computer labs, classes, or library trainings.
The second and equally critical challenge for the US education sector is the threat posed by bad actors intent on wreaking havoc, extorting money, or stealing sensitive data. In July 2019 alone, cyberattacks affected public school systems in New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alabama, Connecticut, and New York. As the rate of cyberattacks on the education sector climb, ransomware attacks in particular are of urgent concern. Of all the confirmed ransomware attacks against state and local targets between 2013 and April 2019, 14 percent targeted local school systems or colleges. With the threat of costly downtime and the unintentional release of sensitive data that often accompany these attacks, today’s ransomware epidemic should cause any public school superintendent or college dean to sit up, take notice, and make real changes to their organizations’ cyber protection practices.
