Back to School: What Every Education IT Pro Needs to Know About Data Protection, Backup, and Disaster Recovery

Education tops Statista’s findings as the sector with the highest average weekly number of cyberattacks. The 2024 State of Ransomware in Education notes that last year was the worst ransomware year on record for education, reporting a 92 percent spike in K-12 attacks. If you’re an IT professional in the education sector, these numbers will undoubtedly motivate you to do more to protect school and student data.

So, what steps can you take to keep private data private by stopping ransomware and other cyber threats? 

Employ Backup and Disaster Recovery Best Practices

Keep Your Disaster Recovery Plan Up to Date

Planning is your best defense against a data disaster and the best way to ensure recovery. Your backup and disaster recovery plan must be comprehensive, detailing how you will restore operations quickly if you suffer a ransomware attack, breach, or data loss.

Best practices include:

• Build out a detailed disaster recovery plan that includes the steps to be taken following an incident, each individual’s responsibilities and tasks, and establishes your recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs/RTOs). This post provides a step-by-step guide to creating an effective disaster recovery plan.

• Test your plan regularly, with scheduled disaster recovery drills to identify any gaps or inefficiencies and ensure your team is prepared and the recovery process will work as intended.

• Employ data tiering to prioritize the most critical data and systems that need to be restored first to minimize disruptions to students, teachers, and administrators.

Implement the 3-2-1-1 Backup Strategy

At Arcserve, we strongly advocate that every organization should follow the 3-2-1-1 backup strategy. This best practice is simple but highly effective in ensuring your data can always be recovered if ransomware, a natural disaster, or other disruption hits your school or district:

• Keep three copies of your data (one original and at least two copies)

• Store your backups on two different media types (network-attached storage, tape, or a local drive, for example)

• Keep one copy offsite (in the cloud or secure storage)

• Ensure one copy is kept in immutable storage

Immutable storage saves your backups in a write-once-read-many (WORM) format. This format can’t be altered or deleted, even by admins and especially by hackers. For K-12 schools, the 3-2-1-1 backup strategy is vital to ensuring data resilience.

Automate Data Backup Processes

As an IT pro in education, you already know that tight budgets mean you must squeeze the most from every dollar spent on technology. Automated data protection solutions, like Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) software, cost-effectively ensure backups are always executed on time, so IT teams don't need to take time for manual backups. 

• Schedule regular backups to meet your RTOs and RPOs 

• Automate verification of backed-up data integrity to ensure backups are completed successfully and are error-free

Arcserve UDP features Assured Recovery, which automatically (or manually) tests your disaster recovery server by running the application and modifying data without impacting your production environment or previously replicated data. Regularly testing and validating your backups’ integrity helps ensure you can always meet your RPOs and RTOs.

Tighten Access to Backups

The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that 31 percent of all breaches over the past ten years involved using stolen credentials. If credentials enabling access to your backups fall into the wrong hands, your data may be lost. So, protecting your data backups is just as important as creating them. 

Best practices include:

• Create strong password policies that require complex strings, including a mix of letters, numbers, and special characters, and regularly update and enforce password changes

• Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) for accessing backup and disaster recovery systems, adding an extra layer of security by requiring more than one form of user verification

• Add role-based access controls (RBAC) that limit access to backup systems only to those team members who need it, so there are fewer opportunities for credentials to be compromised

Train Students and Staff on Cybersecurity

People are a significant cause of data breaches. The 2024 Verizon DBIR found they are involved in 68 percent of breaches. Phishing attacks, weak passwords, and unsafe online habits are all risks that can be mitigated with proper training. 

Best practices include: 

• Schedule ongoing, regular cybersecurity training sessions for staff and students to help them recognize phishing scams, secure personal and school information, and understand the importance of data protection for education

• Run simulated phishing tests to gauge how well your staff and students can identify and avoid phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and other cyber threats, then use the results to improve training and awareness

• Strengthen cybersecurity awareness by incorporating data protection and privacy best practices into school newsletters, posters, and other communications

Implementing Best Practices Made Simple

Arcserve UDP delivers comprehensive data breach protection and cybersecurity for your backups. It features orchestrated recovery that reduces RPOs and RTOs to minutes and, thanks to Assured Recovery, validates service-level agreements (SLAs) and backup integrity. Arcserve UDP protects against data loss and extended downtime across local, virtual, hyperconverged, and SaaS-based workloads. 

Dive into all the benefits that Arcserve UDP offers by requesting a demo.

For answers to your questions about any Arcserve solution, contact us.