As I was preparing for tomorrow’s CoSN 2015 New York CTO Clinic on Long Island, I came across some articles from the other side of the country, in Colorado, debating topics like protecting student data, protecting student privacy, and bolstering FERPA.
It made me think back about when I was a kid, and how I was lucky enough to play Oregon Trail on a "Trash80" in middle school. At that time, Oregon Trail was about the extent of technology in schools. Since then, IT departments have grown tremendously, and today are responsible for much more, from providing file shares and email to school administrators, to providing unique accounts to staff, teachers, students, and even parents for accessing dozens of on-premise and cloud systems.
Photo credit: Impromptu Laptop Location via photopin (license)
School IT departments have an ever-increasing footprint of users and tools to manage, but usually a static budget to do so. As the two articles I linked to earlier show, visibility around student access and student privacy is growing, and in light of this new awareness, schools are starting to ask if they have the right controls in place.
To contextualize this a bit more, a company with 5,000 employees is also asking itself if it has the right controls in place to secure their data and employees. But a school district could have 5,000 employees and 30,000 students. And they usually have a fraction of the IT budget of that company.
Daunting, to say the least.
This challenge is a very important one that we’ll be discussing at tomorrow’s CTO Clinic. Can’t wait to hear the perspectives and ideas from education IT leaders across New York.
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