The use of technology in education is increasing. New innovations and technologies are changing the way that pupils learn, how teachers teach and how senior leaders make decisions every day. The amount of data we’re all producing is growing rapidly too. 90% of all data in existence has been created in the last 24 months and IBM estimate that 2.5 million terabytes of data are now created daily.
The growing use of cloud services and platforms in education, such as Office 365, present new data protection and compliance challenges. Processes to back up, recover, protect and manage data must be considered carefully to minimise risk and ensure compliance, especially given the volume of personal data being held. As experts with over two decades of experience in data management, Redstor looks at the top three data management challenges that schools will face throughout 2019 and how you can manage these effectively to keep your data secure and compliant.
- Ransomware
A Ransomware attack is a malware-attack that infects a user’s device, encrypting data or the system itself and demanding a ransom is paid for access to be returned.
Ransomware has been a growing threat since 2016 and cyber-criminals are today purposefully targeting schools, knowing the value and sensitivity of personal data they hold and the need to recover it quickly. Criminals typically demand that ransoms are paid in crypto-currency, whilst the amount demanded can range from thousands to millions of pounds.
Ransomware attacks often rely on fooling a user on the network into unwittingly executing the ransomware virus. The top causes of this are staff opening malicious email attachments or visiting malicious websites. In 2016, these accounted for 82% of all ransomware infections.
If your systems were infected by a ransomware attack, would you be able to recover your data?
Our tip: Check and be confident that the backup solution you use to back up your data can successfully restore data in the event of a disaster scenario. It is critical that you have an up-to-date version of your data, recovered in a timely manner. Also, the time to get your school back up and running will vary depending on the backup solution you have in place. Ensure that you are equipped to recover your data quickly and efficiently. Redstor has helped hundreds of schools recover from ransomware without paying a ransom. By instantly streaming data on-demand, Redstor eliminates downtime and ensures that users can access data when they need it most.
- Gaining visibility and control while staying compliant
The Information Commissioner’s Office and the Department for Education were already carefully monitoring how schools, colleges and trusts use and manage data prior to the arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Now that GDPR is in effect, having complete visibility of all data as well as the ability to search and action it is more important for schools than ever.
However, with massive proliferation of data and data typically residing in more formats, both on-premise and in multiple cloud environments, knowing what data a school has, where it sits and how to effectively manage it is more challenging than ever. Discovering, searching and analysing all this data is time consuming and complicated, making both decision-making and compliance more difficult to achieve.
The ability to centralise, search and report on data will be increasingly important in education to ensure compliance.
Our tip: Can you easily produce reports and gain full visibility of your entire data environment? As the proliferation of data continues to increase and with more legal obligations in place, it’s becoming increasingly important that schools can demonstrate their stance on this. Redstor’s complete data management solution gives borderless visibility of data across all systems from a centralised location. This allows for easy reporting and assists decision making in relation to the management, including deletion, of data throughout its lifecycle.
- Budgets
Colleges, trusts and schools all face the challenge of doing more, with less, more quickly. Specifically, they need to manage more data and more systems and cloud services without the IT budgets available to commercial organisations.
Unwanted and unforeseen costs can wreak havoc with careful budget planning. This can easily happen when a data management solution becomes obsolete or ineffective long before its planned obsolescence or when a service charges unpredictable costs such as bandwidth fees or recovery charges
Historically, data management solutions like data backup relied on hardware, software and often, physical media. These legacy solutions typically feature complex pricing comprised of hardware and media costs, software license fees, costs for application plugins as well as annual maintenance and support fees.
Modern cloud equivalents meanwhile often attract customers with seemingly low-cost base fees whilst charging for bandwidth or restores. These unpredictable costs can quickly accumulate, often at the worst possible time, in the middle of a disaster. With so many elements making up data management quotes and costs, additional features such as the ability to archive data, long term retention or disaster recovery are often unreachable.
Our tip: By liberating your IT team through automation, Redstor saves time and costs associated with managing data. The unified solution gives education establishments access to secure backup and recovery, archiving, search and insight at one predictable and transparent price-point.
Whether your data is on-premise, hybrid or in the cloud, Redstor’s pioneering InstantDataTM, provides on-demand access, allowing you to stream it in real-time to any device, making downtime a thing of the past.
Backup and recovery, archiving, disaster recovery and migration can be managed through a single web-based control centre, empowering IT departments whilst reducing costs, simplifying deployment and billing, improving security and compliance and providing borderless visibility of your entire data estate.
Redstor's discovery and analytics tools enable organisations to search and action the entirety of their data as well as monitor their usage through a single view, at any time, on any device.
To discover more about how Redstor can help protect your schools from data loss join our webinar or visit the product page.
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