Safend and Education
Protecting Faculty and Student Data
The unique user-intensive nature of education institutions' computing environment leaves it especially vulnerable at the endpoints. With Internet hotspots, classroom computer labs, library terminals, and employee PCs and laptops, the average educational IT ecosystem includes literally thousands of geographically remote, highly-accessible endpoints. Each of these endpoints is a potential access point into the network. Even connection of innocuous communication or entertainment devices like USB drives, iPods and smartphones and even CD/DVDs can result in the loss of sensitive data and or introduce malware that can cripple the network.
According to USA Today, college networks are "leaking data like a sieve." Colleges have been the source of up to half of all reported breaches, according to cyber security reports – and over a hundred serious computer security breaches have been reported at educational institutions in the US alone since 2005, including:
- A University of Nevada, Reno professor lost a flash drive containing the personal information of 16,000 current and former students.
- Stolen Stanford University Laptop Contained 72,000 confidential employee records including social security numbers, telephone numbers and salary information.
Plugging the Leaks
Uniquely suited for the challenges of large-scale university IT environments, Safend Data Protection Suite delivers comprehensive endpoint data protection - offering security administrators the power of granular visibility and control over every potential endpoint leakage channel, coupled with sophisticated security policy creation and enforcement.
Leveraging Safend Protector and Encryptor, IT administrators can apply customized security policies over all PCs/laptops including all physical, wireless and removable storage interfaces – regardless of their physical location in the network..
Safend protects the confidentiality and integrity of student and faculty data by enabling only authorized users to copy data to removable media and storage devices, while at the same time enforcing encryption of data at rest and data in motion, and maintaining a full audit trail of such actions.
Featuring easy deployment and seamless maintenance for administrators, Safend Data Protection Suite enables educational institutions to:
- Centrally monitor and control the flow of inbound and outbound data, blocking unauthorized data transfers from the endpoint and adhering to copyright laws for published content
- Protect proprietary faculty and student data from leaving the institution through unauthorized wireless connections or external storage devices
- Secure data with the enforced encryption of data on laptops, external storage devices and CD/DVDs
- Protect data from the threat of malware and hardware keylogger devices
- Comply with regulations such as the California Security Breach Information Act (SB-1386), PCI and HIPAA (for institutions associated with healthcare)