There is no doubt that the monumental shift to remote and flexible learning has created some powerful opportunities for schools to improve the way they deliver their programs.
However, with these opportunities have also come several key challenges that the education sector is now being confronted with. Perhaps the most significant one of these challenges is how to ensure that the mountains of data are both secure and backed up.
Many Australian schools have been rushing to scale up existing online learning environments, and organisations are leveraging Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technologies and resources to scale the needs for all students and teachers.
But just how safe is your school’s cloud SaaS-stored data?
While some might assume that data cannot be lost if it is stored on the public cloud, it is possible for hackers to infiltrate the SaaS environment and delete important data. Risks can also come from within the school’s learning community, with the accidental deletion of data by employees or students.
While the cloud provides users high availability, the same can’t be said for robust disaster recovery.
In fact, there are many important considerations for schools when it comes to how they should be backing up their data.
Data protection and accessibility
Education institutions ought to centralise backup tasks for virtual machines, Windows endpoints, and particularly their Microsoft 365 and G Suite to on-premise solution such as the likes of network attached storage (NAS), not to mention the need to ensure users to have access to their data at all times thanks to their intricate high availability configuration.
Not to mention, when it comes to disaster recovery, which is required in instances such as accidental deletion by students or teachers, a sophisticated recovery portal and multi-versioning are proven to be essential.
Data ownership and governance
On top of data protection, such on-premise solution gives schools higher degrees of data ownership and governance, consequently compliments the compliance purposes, ensuring employees’, students’, finance’, or any other sensitive data is stored securely with decorum. Moreover, the ability to preserve event logs shall be fully utilized to ensure badly intended personnel who triggered anomalies or malicious activities are held accountable.
Total cost ownership
Finally, besides the initial capital for hardware, such a solution is totally license-free. This is a game changer for a lot of resource-thin schools and institutions.
Synology’s centralised backup dashboard enables schools’ IT admins to monitor real-time and historical protection of backup services, storage consumption, as well as data transmission history.
Schools can enable continuous backup to minimise the risk of data loss, flexibly preserve backup versions by setting a specific time period for file retention, and minimise required storage space with single instancing and block-level deduplication.
In addition, the self-recovery portal allows users to go beyond the public cloud’s native recovery capabilities and default retention period by providing granular recovery, content search, and data export.
Synology’s solutions essentially provide an easy way for schools to deploy hybrid cloud infrastructure by its user-friendly application’s ecosystem, and is a perfect choice for schools that are looking to build a robust cloud data protection strategy. For more information about how Synology can help your school, please click here.
