Many cloud storage providers offer some key backup features that can help better mitigate the effects of data leaks and ransomware attacks including object-level immutability that prevents anyone from tampering with, modifying or deleting data for a set period of time, keeping files safe against disruption. The cloud also allows for backup diversification to help prevent schools from storing all of their data in one place to be targeted. A multi-cloud approach enables educational institutions to follow a ‘3-2-1’ backup strategy, otherwise known as keeping three copies of data, with two on different media formats and one off-site, that helps prevent hackers from accessing all storage locations and enables companies to continue functioning during an attack and restore operations quickly. At Hotchkiss, we’ve found these backup strategies to be vital to ensuring our data security, and leveraging these kinds of additional safety features will become even more critical for educational institutions as security threats grow.
Digital transformation
Schools around the world were forced to quickly digitally transform to support both remote and hybrid learning due to COVID-19, but with limited resources and IT budgets. While many have returned to in-person learning, budget and resource challenges persist while school districts attempt to get local municipalities to approve budget increases to cover increased costs for technologies.
It’s never been more critical for IT teams to move away from relying on costly on-premises options, or those that carry expensive tiers and additional charges for egress and API requests to support their technologies. In order for schools to successfully continue their digital transformation initiatives and innovate on a budget, they must adopt a more simple, cost-effective and high-performing storage solution that can better support their growing reliance on technology at a lesser cost.
Surveillance storage challenges
Earlier this year, West Virginia legislature passed a bill to increase video surveillance requirements for special education classrooms. This is one of the latest incidents of heightened surveillance demands for schools around the country, requiring them to store and produce surveillance footage for certain set time periods at a moment’s notice.
This poses an issue for the education industry. The vast amounts of data being generated through these surveillance systems promise to completely overwhelm many schools’ existing on-premise storage systems, creating storage bottlenecks and preventing administrators from being able to quickly access the data when needed. By moving to a flexible, hybrid cloud approach that can scale with their growing surveillance data volumes, Hotchkiss and other schools can cost-effectively extend the value from any of their existing storage solutions while keeping this critical surveillance data securely at the edge for easy storage and access.
K-12 schools have undergone an especially complicated transition over the past three years. This period exposed the need for more technological innovation and IT infrastructure changes in school systems, starting with the cloud, to help address data security and storage challenges. At the Hotchkiss school, it was no different. Overwhelmed by the amount of data created on our busy campus, we recently turned to Wasabi to build a low-cost, high-performance and secure storage solution that fully protects our environment. For an industry seeing exploding data volumes and security threats while faced with limited resources, the time is now for IT teams to find a reliable and secure cloud solution that will protect their school’s most valuable asset – data.
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