Spanning across the cities of Sumner and Bonney Lake, Washington, Sumner-Bonney Lake School District supports 1,075 employees and a steadily climbing student body of 10,000 through its identity access management (IAM) system management (IAM) system.

As the fifth-largest public school district in Texas, Austin Independent School District (ISD) is guided by the motto “AISD Anywhere” to provide 100,000 students, teachers, and parents greater access to their EdTech tools.

As the fifth-largest school system in Georgia, Clayton County Public Schools (CCPS) has a history of delivering quality education to a diversity of students.

When Chief Technology Officer Rod Smith stepped into his role nine years ago, there were no online systems for students to log in and access resources.

Educational institutions are frequent targets of ransomware attacks, with account takeovers being one of the largest causes. These attacks can cost institutions millions of dollars in downtime, people time, device cost, network cost, lost opportunity, and ransom paid. Plus, ransomware attacks put institutional data at risk and can cause the school to temporarily close.

College and university systems comprised of multiple institutions face many IT challenges due to their complex organizational structures and breadth of users. Often, sharing systemwide services to reduce costs and minimize complexity is at odds with the need to maintain control and prohibit visibility of individual institutional resources.

The COVID-19 pandemic spotlighted the challenge school districts, colleges, universities, and other educational institutions face in delivering continuity of learning for each student, regardless of their environment.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many K-12 educational institutions are using remote or hybrid learning models. This growing digital footprint has created a prime opportunity for malicious actors to take advantage of districts’ increased reliance on digital tools. 

Seemingly overnight, the entire face of K-12 education completely shifted. Due to COVID-19, schools were forced to rethink how to deliver education in a new digital format. The majority of districts did not have a 1:1 program in place, meaning new devices had to be made available and issued to individual students without funding, training, or time for planning.

2020 for K-12 districts was anything but standard— so how do we define the education model that occurred in this uncharted territory? 

According to a recent Gallup report regarding educational technology use in K-12, 65% of teachers say they use digital learning tools to teach every day. To provide their services, digital learning vendors require timely and up-to-date access to student, teacher, and class roster data. Unfortunately, schools haven’t changed their rostering processes to meet digital demands, i.e. they’re still manually compiling and uploading these rosters to third-party applications.