Data Protection in Education: Best Practices

Technology is embedded in every part of education institutions, from managing operations to delivering learning. But with growing reliance comes growing risk, from data loss and downtime to compliance pressures and cyber threats and these are only the start. 

Balancing these demands against tight budgets and sensitive information isn’t easy. That’s why protecting your data isn’t just about IT, because when technology fails, the disruption is felt across the whole institution.

Protecting Data in Education: Best Practices every institution should follow 

In over 20 years in the IT industry, we’ve partnered with hundreds of educational establishments including; schools, colleges, universities, and multi-academy trusts across the UK. That’s why we understand the unique challenges education institutions face when it comes to data protection and compliance. Our experience allows us to design and deliver backup solutions that are robust and fully compliant. Our solutions are purposefully tailored to the diverse workloads used in education environments. 

As a Veeam Platinum Service Provider, Commvault Premier Partner, and Wasabi Partner, we’re able to leverage leading technologies and build reliable solutions. Our competitive pricing model is designed to fit the tight budgets common in the education sector.

Challenges of data protection in education

• Budget Constraints – Education establishments operate on extremely limited budgets, making it difficult to invest in enterprise-grade backup and recovery solutions. This often leads to a reliance on outdated non-compliant solutions or unprotected workloads, leaving critical data and systems completely unprotected.  

• Shared Responsibility Model – Many educational establishments are migrating to cloud platforms to streamline staff and students access to their resources. The responsibility to protect data remains the same regardless of where the data is located. All cloud providers operate a Shared Responsibility Model which details how backing up the data is still the customers’ responsibility. 

• Cybersecurity Threats – The education sector is an increasingly popular target for cybercriminals. As ransomware attacks continue to surge, it’s imperative that robust backup and recovery strategies are implemented and tested frequently to ensure all workloads are recoverable within an acceptable time frame.

• Data Sensitivity – We recognise that education establishments handle extremely sensitive data including student and staff personal information, safeguarding and financial data. A breach or data loss can have serious legal and reputational damage. 

• Compliance Requirements – Several laws and guidelines including the Data Protection Act, GDPR, and recommendations from the Department for Education and the National Cyber Security Centre, require strict data protection and retention policies to be in place. Non-compliance can result in significant penalties and fines along with reputational damage and legal action.  

How to protect data effectively in the education industry

• Best Practices – It’s vital that best practices are followed as standard. The 3-2-1-1-0 strategy is a good place to start (3 copies of your data, 2 different storage media, 1 off-site copy, 1 immutable copy and 0 errors after backup verification). Ensure you Test Recovery Regularly to make sure your systems can be restored quickly and easily if needed. Enforce Encryption & MFA to prevent unauthorised access to your backups.
  
• Workload Protection – Whether its on-premises or in the cloud, you should have a backup solution in place. The Shared Responsibility Model in cloud computing outlines how responsibilities between the service provider and customer are divided. If your utilising platforms such as Azure, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, backup is not included as standard. It is your responsibility to protect your data within these platforms.
• Data Security & Compliance – Make sure that backups are immutable, this ensures they cannot be changed once created, helping to prevent data loss or malicious activity. Ensure that you have an air-gapped backup to provide a physically isolated backup from the primary production infrastructure and network or cloud platform being utilised. 

As more education institutions move to hybrid cloud setups, data protection is essential. With our proven best practices and solutions designed to fit education budgets, we can help you keep your data safe, stay compliant, and make sure learning isn’t disrupted, even when things don’t go as planned. 

If you want to learn more about how we can support your data protection needs, just fill out the form below to arrange a call with one of our Cloud & Data Solution Specialists. We’ll help you build a data protection plan that works for your institution.