Frontline Blog

What does business continuity have to do with education? School districts have learned from experience how to manage crises. They are skilled at notifying students, parents, and other stakeholders in the community. Safety protocols have expanded far beyond fire drills into lockdown and active shooter drills.

In the shadowy corners of the internet, medical records are readily available for purchase. On the dark web and black market, patient records can sell for $1,000 apiece. These records are sold to buyers in many industries: data brokers like IQVIA (formerly known as IMS Health), pharmaceutical firms and even tech companies. Children’s health data is just as valuable, and no one can doubt that medical records, especially those for our children, should be rigorously protected.

Technologies with the potential to improve the school experience are popping up left and right. Some of that technology is for students. Some of it is for educators. Some of it is for the athletic coaching staff. But no matter who is using the technology, its management and upkeep usually fall to the person with District Technology Director or CTO in their email signature.

Do you know what would happen to your school district’s data in the event of a cyber-attack? How much data, exactly, would be at-risk if your school district were suddenly exposed? Who would be affected and what information could become available?

Unless you’ve been offline since the days of dial-up and connecting to the internet courtesy of a CD from America Online, you know what it’s like to turn on the news and wonder if your passwords are now in some hacker’s grubby fingers.

What steps should you take to activate efficient and consistent data-based decision-making in your district? For district technology teams, this is not an easy question to answer.

Making sure that your people are being paid the right amount, consistently and on time is among the most critical responsibilities of a school business office. An unintended consequence in many districts, however, is that Finance and Payroll tend to be an island instead of working alongside Human Resources.

School district technology leaders: there’s a growing threat to the schools you serve, and it’s not low internet bandwidth or outdated hardware… it’s school cyber attacks.

Just this month, over 143 million American discovered their sensitive information was compromised by a massive security breach at Equifax. Once again Americans find themselves scrambling to update passwords and wondering when the scammer emails and phone calls will start rolling in.