Cybersecurity has always been — or should be — a top priority for K–12 schools, which protect mountains of confidential student data and faculty information. However, the recent shift to remote learning has made cybersecurity an even more important concern. With more people using more devices to connect to schools’ IT networks from more locations, it is essential for IT leaders in education to follow best practices to keep their environments safe.

In my experience, most schools can eliminate the vast majority of serious cyberthreats simply by implementing the five pillars of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework.

CDW provides technology solutions to our 250,000 new and existing global customers through our sales and service delivery teams. Our broad array of solutions include cloud, security, data center optimization, mobility, virtualization and collaboration technologies and services. CDW has the knowledge and experience with your environment to provide full stack support.

From hardware to software, services to cloud, CDW has the technical acumen and critical partner relationships to get you what you need and get it up and running quickly and accurately, especially with AWS.

Due in part to widespread remote learning, the public cloud has claimed an even greater role in K–12 education over the past year than it held before. Public cloud resources bring benefits such as elasticity, but they can also put school systems at risk of cyberattacks and data breaches if organizations don’t take appropriate security measures.

The following five steps can help K–12 schools keep their cloud environments as secure as possible.

The CIO of a large financial services firm recently approached me for assistance in building out her company’s cyber-resilience strategy. Specifically, she knew that the firm was going to need to add an additional data center over the next year to meet growing demand, and she wanted to use that expansion as an opportunity to enhance the firm’s business continuity program. CDW provided the company with some practical advice to help draw this additional benefit from its investment.

While we were helping a very large organization expand an existing global footprint, the advice we shared is relevant across firms of all sizes. Let’s take a look at a few ways that all organizations can enhance cyber resilience.

So. Much. Data.

According to some estimates, 90 percent of the world’s data was created in the past two years, and growth is only accelerating. While storage costs have dropped as data volumes have ballooned, organizations are still running into trouble when they don’t optimize their data storage environments for factors such as cost and regulatory compliance.

By embracing solid data lifecycle management practices, you can overcome major challenges — such as cost, retrieval, disaster recovery and management — and keep up with the rapid pace of your data’s growth.

Almost every customer that we talk to wants a disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Many organizations will push their backup and recovery solutions to the brink but never really achieve the ability to run applications in production in the event of a disaster. This is likely because of cost and complexity.

Traditional colocation facilities or secondary data center locations in an active-active setup tend to have high costs by way of traditional data center expenses. Why build two data centers when you only need one?

Using traditional independent software vendor (ISV) solutions coupled with a handful of native cloud tools can keep costs low. But this arrangement requires cloud skillsets that most customers do not have in-house. For many customers, this means their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is at risk.