1. Data Breaches Threaten K–12 Cloud Environments
With schools storing troves of private student data, from grades and student records to health and financial information, the priority for K–12 IT managers has to be reducing the risk of data breaches. Cloud-based applications may make IT managers feel powerless due to a lack of physical servers, networks, firewalls, intrusion detection systems or VPNs.
Instead, the responsibility for security shifts to the cloud service provider. The attack surface increases because if either the cloud service provider or the district IT team makes a configuration error, the risk of a breach grows. Because IT teams may have little ability to influence service providers, mitigating cloud-based data breaches requires multiple strategies.
The most important mitigation method requires that IT teams take the time to understand the service provider’s shared responsibility model for security. It’s not sufficient to guess at what makes sense, or what seems to be happening. The IT team must dive deep with each service provider and understand exactly where the lines are drawn.
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If the school’s IT team hasn’t properly configured security or has skipped some steps, then the ultimate responsibility for a breach falls on the school. Sales teams and busy CIOs may wave away security concerns, assuring everyone that this outsourcing makes security the service provider’s problem, but that’s never true. IT teams must understand and engage to help mitigate this risk.
Additional mitigations for breaches come from taking advantage of every security feature offered by the service provider.
- Can we enable mandatory encryption for data at rest? Let’s do that.
- Can we block unencrypted access to web applications? Turn on that feature.
- Is multifactor authentication an option? Turn that on for every single user, without exception.
- Are there zero-trust security features available, such as geographic fencing, user behavior anomaly detection or platform integrity checking? Enable them, and make sure that privileged access users are carefully monitored.
IT teams should also schedule regular security audits and configuration reviews as another mitigation practice. Cloud-environments are inherently more dynamic than on-premises systems, which means a regular review can uncover important information. New security features are often added, but not automatically enabled. And old configuration assumptions may not hold true as service providers and application developers continue to update and upgrade their applications in the background.
2. Unauthorized Access Puts K–12 Data at Risk
Every IT manager knows that role-based access controls, along with strong logging and auditing, are the best way to ensure no one sees or changes data they shouldn’t. Cloud-based environments, especially SaaS applications, confuse and complicate these issues when each application has its own access control and logging models.
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Mitigating the threat of unauthorized access requires that IT professionals have a school-controlled identity and access management system at the core of all access decisions, which should be a non-negotiable point when shifting any application to the cloud. IT teams should insist that any SaaS application integrates with the district’s own IAM tools, whether it’s Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory or an education-specific IAM product.
Central control of IAM is especially essential for applications used by small sets of users, such as student health information or physical security systems. As many IT teams have learned the hard way, there’s no better way to start your attack on an organization’s IT infrastructure than through a seldom-used and never-audited application.
Getting cloud-based application providers to deliver logging information is often impossible, so a central IAM helps to debug problems, detect unauthorized or excessive access early, and provide a critical audit trail.
While simply integrating applications with district IAM doesn’t remove the threat of unauthorized access, it does create a way for IT teams to monitor and control who is using what application. And they can quickly and universally cut off that access if a stolen credential or a rogue user is detected.
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