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- Great digital learning means the creation of more data.
And unfortunately that means more risk.
As your digital footprint continues to grow
and students and teachers spend more time online,
it's important to find a partner you can trust
to handle your data securely, privately,
and in compliance with relevant laws and school regulations.
Our next guest is here to address just that and share how
Microsoft can help you support a more streamlined, trusted,
and secure data system.
Please join me in welcoming Corey Lee,
a zero trust architect at Microsoft.
- Hey everyone, I'm Corey Lee,
a zero trust architect at Microsoft.
Although things like device deployment and cloud management
are important to facilitating teaching and learning
and driving student outcomes,
it's my job to help keep student data safe and secure.
And today I'm going to show you
how to protect student data,
safeguard schools from cyber attacks
and take advantage of the cloud to do so.
Let's get started.
According to Microsoft threat intelligence,
education had the highest number of devices
with malware encounters across all industries
with over 5 million encounters in the last 30 days alone.
Today school districts are major hubs
of high value data, at Microsoft,
we know that securing the student experience
is your number one priority.
So our devices come equipped with built in safety features,
privacy policies and antivirus software.
To assist K-12 districts
with current challenges around security,
compliance and identity,
we are committed to the following priorities
to help reduce risk, save teachers time and help cut costs.
We are committed to intelligent student security.
We know that student accounts are a prime target
for attacks and securing student accounts
can be challenging.
Intelligent security features like identity protection can
use machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect
when student credentials have been stolen
and automatically protect those student accounts
if they are compromised,
we are also committed to automated student supervision.
We know creating a safe and inclusive learning environment
is a top priority for many schools,
automated supervision features like communications
compliance and information barriers allow schools to
seamlessly manage digital communications and help prevent
things like offensive language or inappropriate content
from being shared in the classroom.
In addition to that,
we are committed to automated student data protection
and privacy.
Many schools struggle with knowing where student data
has been shared and how to handle student data
privacy management,
regardless of the learning device
or a collaboration platform,
automated student data protection features
like information protection,
allow schools to protect student data anytime and anywhere.
And finally,
we are committed to simplifying compliance.
With regulations constantly changing,
we know schools need automated tools to track those changes
and successfully pass audits.
Compliance management features like assessment templates
can allow school staff to automate the reviews
for compliance assessments and improvement actions
necessary to certify compliance with state,
local and federal regulations like FERPA.
I am joined now by Emily Bell from Fulton County. Hi Emily.
- Hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be here.
I'm Emily Bell.
I'm the chief information officer for Fulton County
schools in the Atlanta Georgia area.
Our district has about 90,000 students.
We have a hundred schools,
so we're definitely a large Metro district
with lots of challenges.
- Let's talk a little bit about the Fulton County
journey over the last 18 months
with remote emergency learning and virtual learning.
- I want to start by talking about February.
Our district and our schools had autonomy.
So many of them were using very different platforms.
One month later,
we're in this remote teaching environment and
all of our schools begin using the various platforms
that they had.
Some of them were using the office 365 tools,
we began worrying about right away
the way that we send updates to our student devices.
So we quickly pivoted to using Microsoft Defender
on the devices themselves to help with filtering,
to make sure that what the students were accessing at home
was CIPA compliant, was safe.
We did increase our bandwidth in the district
and we began really leaning into Intune,
the Microsoft Intune tool to manage our devices.
So all of that was happening in March.
When we hit May just a couple of months later,
we sent a survey to our parents and we said,
how did it go?
Across the board Corey, we were hearing from parents.
We don't like having to go to all of these different places.
So the superintendent,
the board of education here in Fulton County schools got
behind the commitment and the decision to standardize
on Microsoft Office 365 and using Microsoft Teams as our
standard platform for collaboration
and productivity, across the district,
we really leaned into the platform.
Our teachers were amazing.
- Wow, Emily, I am so happy
we were able to partner with the Fulton team to provide
the support needed throughout that journey.
I know you're focused on keeping
students secure as well.
Can you talk a little bit about what some of those
priorities are and with respect
to keeping students safe and secure?
- Absolutely.
So keeping students safe and secure is a priority,
when they are in our buildings,
we can pretty much assure that.
When they went home and they're working remotely,
then we had to change our work a little.
Prior to the pandemic to update a device,
if they were at home,
they were routed back to our network to receive that update.
But we were concerned about the bandwidth challenge there.
So we had to change our work so students could receive
their updates remotely, no matter where they were.
And remember,
updates is really what keeps that device secure.
It is a priority that that device receives
its updates on a regular basis.
We also deployed Defender.
We wanted to take all measures possible to make sure that
our students were safe and secure no matter where they were
either in our building or at home.
- So Emily,
we know that student accounts are oftentimes
a top target for attackers.
Did you take any additional steps to protect
student accounts throughout this journey?
- K-12 districts across the nation,
possibly globe are victims of cyber attacks all the time.
So our staff are enrolled in the multifactor authentication.
And so that helps keep our staff accounts safe.
But our student accounts,
we initiated a student password change.
They could do this on their own.
So we just tried to make sure that our families
knew the importance of a good safe password
and give them the ability to change it.
- Wow. This has been eyeopening.
Emily I want to give you a second,
just in case you have anything else
that you want to add today.
- I do want to give a shout out
to my technology staff members
and to technology staff members
all over the nation and the globe.
We leaned in to the platforms we already had.
We leaned into our Microsoft A5 license
and garnered a commitment from Microsoft
to help us be successful.
While the pandemic was really hard,
we did show the value of technology,
show that technology could help bridge the gap
and facilitate learning.
So from here, the sky's the limit.
- Thank you, Fulton County for that great conversation.
Before we go,
I would like to take a moment to talk about trust.
Everything we've covered today, including student safety,
security for student devices, and data protection,
depends on the devices and software you put your trust in.
It's a big responsibility and it's something
that we take very seriously at Microsoft.
If I can leave you with one message here today,
remember this,
your trust is the foundation of every decision
and action we take here at Microsoft.
You allow us to build open transparent spaces
that protect student privacy,
empower instruction and allow each student
to do and achieve more.
Well, that's all for me.
I hope you've gained some valuable insights on ways
to keep your school's data safe and secure.