Cybersecurity Partners Help K–12 IT Teams Focus on What Matters
Christopher Kissel, IDC research vice president for security and trust products, notes that managed security providers have specialists devoted to monitoring alerts. They also have automated tools that help them respond to incidents quickly. “The largest benefit from outsourcing traffic monitoring and alerts is that on-premises personnel can be more squarely devoted to IT-related tasks such as onboarding new servers and devices, installing software updates and checking configurations,” Kissel says.
The partnership with Arctic Wolf has become so important to Eden Prairie Schools that the district won’t adopt any solutions that don’t integrate with the vendor’s monitoring tools. Arctic Wolf ingests millions of logs each week and flags a relatively small portion as problematic. From those, the vendor sends the district only about 20 alerts, and Arctic Wolf professionals are available to help Townsend and his team address those incident tickets.
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“They’re not just a ticketing platform that sends us information and wishes us the best of luck,” Townsend says. “It’s really a true partnership. Our tickets are back and forth, not a one-way conversation. They’re proactively meeting with us, looking at things like Active Directory, firewall rules and network configurations to tell us what they see in our environment and what we can do to better our security.”
Arctic Wolf’s security awareness offering sends simulated phishing attempts to faculty and staff, then provides short, on-demand training videos to help them better identify spoof emails. The videos, which are just a few minutes long, give employees the information they need without requiring Townsend’s team to conduct lengthy training sessions.
“At some point, everyone has recognized that these threats are not stopping,” Townsend says. “Schools are target-rich environments, but we don’t have a huge security staff. We’re designed to help kids get the education they deserve in the classroom. Our primary goal is educating our children so that they can grow up and be strong contributors to a 21st century workforce. Our partnership with Arctic Wolf helps us strike that balance.”