How cloud security can help you comply with student data protection regulations

As technology transforms education, student data protection is crucial to ensure safe digital experiences for both teachers and students. This blog explores cloud security's importance to student well-being while offering solutions that assist schools in meeting compliance standards while creating safe digital learning environments with improved pastoral outcomes.

Regulations and Legal Compliance 

Educational institutions operating within the government and public sectors face a complex regulatory landscape for protecting sensitive data, such as Protective Security Policy Framework (PSPF). 

PSPF's structured risk management approach guides data protection at schools, helping ensure student records' confidentiality, integrity and availability - key components to providing a secure digital learning environment. Compliance provides a safe learning environment for students and regulations exist to protect information that require special safeguarding measures - academic records, personal details and health records are key examples.  

Academic Records 

Academic records provide an in-depth account of a student's educational journey through grades, transcripts, and performance evaluations. At stake is the potential impact on students' futures from any unauthorised access or manipulation of academic records - requiring rigorous protection measures. 

Personal Information 

Student records contain sensitive personal details like names, addresses and contact info that must remain private. Identity theft and other malicious activities pose a grave risk of harming an individual's privacy, financial fraud, and their digital life. 

Health Records 

Health records provide valuable insight into a student's medical histories, allergies and treatments received. These records are sensitive due to their potential for discrimination or stigmatisation, making unauthorised access even more sensitive due to potentially biased treatment or disclosure - highlighting the necessity for robust protection measures. 

Data Minimisation and Retention Policies

Data minimisation and retention policies are an essential element of safeguarding student data protection. Such policies prioritise essential data collection, establish clear retention timelines, and help mitigate privacy risks. Start by focusing on essential data by evaluating educational goals, eliminating unnecessary information collection. Then determine specific retention timelines based on legal, academic, and administrative requirements and from there you can use automated systems to simply delete data after specified periods using. It’s important that you restrict sensitive data exposure to minimise breaches and prioritise lean datasets to help protect essential data the whole way through.  

Cloud-Managed Endpoint Security 

Adopting cloud-managed endpoint security measures has become essential to maintaining compliance. Educational institutions are increasingly turning to device management for its scalability, flexibility, and enhanced security features. Here are some strategies and best practices for protecting student devices, identity, and data:  

• Implement automated patching for OS, applications, drivers, and firmware. 
• Apply granular permissions with strict access controls to limit unwarranted exposure while reducing risks. 
• Apply Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for increased security. 
• Conduct regular security audits identify vulnerabilities and assess existing measures; employ automated vulnerability auditing with continuous monitoring of threat detection and aligned security protocols. 

Solutions to meet compliance standards  

The Microsoft 365 A5 security suite helps your school follow regulatory compliance, student protection and security best practices which are easy to implement. The A5 security suite is crucial in helping to preserve student data, manage compliance policies, and detect and respond to cybersecurity threats.  

Microsoft Purview Information Protection  

This tool integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365, and assists your school in discovering, classifying, and managing sensitive data across your data landscape while complying with regulations and policies. This allows you to:

• Document and organise school data efficiently for tracking and organisation. 
• Utilise a comprehensive data governance platform to adhere to regulations, identify sensitive information, and protect it, while strengthening overall security measures. 

Data Loss Prevention 

Microsoft DLP for schools provides essential protection of sensitive information. This technology identifies, monitors, and prevents leaks or unauthorised access. Here are some key features of Microsoft DLP:   

• Custom policies with real-time monitoring help to ensure privacy regulation compliance while safeguarding academic, personal and health records. 
• Integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 for a comprehensive defense against data breaches. 
• Optimises overall cybersecurity within educational institutions. 

Mobile Device Management (Intune) 

Cloud-managed device compliance enables you to:   

• Manage the mobile devices and apps your staff and students use for school. 
• Protect school data by helping to control the way your users access and share it. 
• Ensure devices and apps are compliant with security requirements. 

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint 

Cloud-managed endpoint security makes it easy to set up systems that stay vigilant in detecting and containing cybersecurity threats that strike networks and devices in classrooms and across your cohorts. This empowers you to: 

• Prevent, detect, and contain vulnerabilities automatically discovered across your devices and applications. 
• Utilise Microsoft Defender to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks across devices, apps, and data 
• Create playbooks to automatically investigate threats via Automated Investigation and Response 

Cloud security and compliance are of utmost importance to act as digital pastoral care for students; safeguarding student data, protecting privacy and upholding trust between educational institutions. 

While implementing these solutions across your school is relatively easy, it does require some internal training and time to create the policies, test implementation and roll out. With most IT departments within schools being stretched, and time is spent on other initiatives and BAU tasks, security and compliance often take a back seat or fall into the “too hard” basket, until something bad happens.

That’s why we’ve created templates specifically for the Education sector to simplify the deployment with prebuilt best practice policies and configurations to accelerate adoption and deployment. Contact us to see how CNS can help your school comply with student data protection regulations.  

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