Protect Student Identities
To protect student identities, the Student Data Transparency and Security Act had been signed by the State of Colorado in the mid of the year 2016. This act required implementation of third and final stage, wherein LEPs or Local Education Providers are required to adopt Student Information Privacy and Protection Policy by the end of the year 2017 (and by July 2018 for institutions in rural areas). This law collectively governs, regulates, and protects all data and information related to the Students Personal Identifiable Information or SPII. SPII or PII i.e. Personal Identifiable Information of a student can be a combination of student’s personal information or the information related to his family and whereabouts which needs to be protected from unauthorized access. This confidential information needs to be maintained and protected at all levels whether it is the school directly collecting it, or service on-demand provider or through any third-party contractor collecting it on behalf of the institute. As per this act, ultimately, it becomes the obligation of educational institutes to take full control in ensuring complete security and privacy to protect student data under all circumstances while working with this confidential data in favor of the students’ rights and reservations.
Protect Student Data with Next-Gen CASB Solutions
With this legislation regulating and governing the institutes to enact stringent physical security measures and protocols across the institute, the transmission of this confidential data over Internet or Cloud applications needs to be looked at with a much wider perspective. The growing use of Cloud services primary for use in schools and educational institutes to include huge networks, websites, online portals, and mobile apps too need to re-visit the procedures to protect Student Personal Identifiable Information. Such institutes, while working with cloud systems, must comply with SPII Privacy and Protection policy to induce broader control over the intricate processes encompassing variety of different platforms. Since most of the third party vendors are not sensitive to such obligations of an institute that an institute must need to comply with, it becomes all the more important or educational institutes to be extra cautious of such things before treading forward to adopt any third-party application into their existing model. This extra bit of caution needs to be exercised at the time of approving any application for use, and even if a cloud application doesn’t support adequate security measures or absolute control over cloud data, schools or educational institutes can certainly rely on a CASB solution for Cloud, which provides innumerable features to safeguard confidential data to keep it secure at all times.
Colorado’s Education Department has given quite an extensive list consisting of the sample policies, which are always encouraged to be implemented by all school systems to protect student identities. With a wide range and reach of cloud suites including Office 365, G Suite etc., into the educational institutions, a next-gen CASB solution is the need of the hour, to help protect these educational institutes to achieve their goals, which have been set out in most of such policies. An adept CASB solutions works on the modules including Access Control, Password, and Identity and Access Management (IAM); which work even greater than Antivirus software for Malware in the BYOD era of cloud-based computing method; thus helping the achieve greater compliance, ensure data privacy and much more.
Broadly speaking, any efficient CASB i.e. cloud access security broker solution would certainly help educations firms to identify as well as to protect SPII across their cloud apps and other devices. Their advanced techniques and technologies help in ensuring that whether the institute has only some few known SaaS apps, or they are having a broader range of many lesser known apps as well as custom applications too, then the CASB solution can be automatically adapted to support such use cases. Regardless of the geographical location of an institute, any such organization dealing with PII to protect student identities, the legislation put forth by Colorado’s General Assembly has represented best practices for over cloud.