by ManagedMethods CEO Charlie Sander, for eLearning Inside
When K-12 schools closed their buildings at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, IT departments’ cybersecurity plans were flipped inside out.
Districts went from monitoring student, teacher, and staff account activity on school networks to flying blind as that activity dispersed across private networks and cloud applications. IT teams are tasked with the challenge of protecting against threats while school data is accessed from anywhere at any time.
Cybersecurity isn’t the only challenge due to school buildings being closed—students may have less supervision to keep them safe from cyber safety incidents. These incidents include cyberbullying, self-harm, threats of violence, racial and LGBTQ discrimination, domestic abuse, and more that occur within popular cloud applications used by schools today.
This fall, when the 2020-21 academic year begins, districts must be ready to monitor their cloud environments more closely, as most student and staff activity will take place in these applications. And when that activity picks back up, district IT admins will face different and more advanced cybersecurity threats than what they experienced previously.
