MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF BYOD
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has become the norm and with ever-increasing use by students, faculty, and administrators, educational organisations need to scale bandwidth and provide secure access. Sensitive information must be secured and compliance standards protecting the sensitive information of both staff and students must be met, such as DPA, KCSIE, Prevent etc. Infosec Partners has expertise in developing, implementing and managing BYOD security solutions within the education sector.
BYOD Security Solutions
BYOD can increase student and teacher collaboration, extend learning beyond the traditional classroom walls and cut costs. However, despite its benefits, BYOD also presents challenges which many organisations still haven’t come to grips with and the biggest of all is security.
As schools continue to adopt BYOD, security must be a key pillar in the planning and implementation process. The volume and variety of mobile devices brought onto the school network will only continue to increase. Security is critical to ensure the safe and effective benefits of BYOD.
Identity-based Access Management
By defining users by role such as faculty, staff, student or guest, or by more granular characteristics like individual user, class, and location, schools can enhance the user experience for students and staff while ensuring security through identity-based policies for web and network access.
Bandwidth management and QoS
Given most users carry more than one Internet connected device (often including a laptop, smartphone and tablet), bandwidth consumption can easily quadruple with a BYOD. Combine this with the fact that more critical services are moving to the cloud such as online testing, attendance and payroll, effective management of bandwidth can be critical for operational continuity.
Protect against Cyber threats
Mobile devices are particularly high-risk as they can be compromised when brought outside a school’s defences. Attackers recognise it is often easier to compromise a user’s mobile device to steal data stored on them or gain access through them, than it is to try to breach these services from a data centre. Allowing a mobile device onto the network that is infected with malware could lead to a damaging security breach.
