Transform Security with Dell Technologies K–12 Best Practices for Cybersecurity and Physical Safety

Safety is an essential factor in creating the

right environment to enable learning for

students and teachers. Unfortunately, schools

and students are at risk today. Violence and

threats have become all too common in the

classroom. And the threats are not just physical:

in 2018 alone, 122 cyberattacks were carried out

against K–12 schools in the U.S., which means

that a cyberattack takes place in a U.S. school

district every three days.*

How can K–12 schools respond effectively to

these threats? They must transform security

by implementing a strong security strategy that

supports the entire IT ecosystem, including

endpoints, the data center, surveillance

technologies, security operations, identity

management, cloud and virtualization. Such a

strategy can mitigate risk and ensure safety,

by creating safer classrooms and protecting

personally identifiable information (PII) and

student data.

2 K–12 Best Practices for Cybersecurity and Physical Safety

K–12 IT staff need to work with administrators,

students, teachers and parents to stop network

breaches and prevent malware while also

protecting students and teachers from physical

threats to the classroom.

Dell Technologies helps schools transform

security through solutions that protect people

and the critical information districts have to

manage in today’s open digital and physical

environments. Security is at the core of our

company, and it is the foundation of each of

our trusted technologies across all seven of our

brands.

Conduct a security risk assessment. Developing a strong safety plan starts with a comprehensive overview of the gaps and weaknesses that currently exist in your school or district. When we engage with you to discuss security transformation, we provide a team of security consultants and risk management specialists who conduct a thorough assessment of your environment, following industry standards set by NIST, FISMA and other key organizations. Our assessment can include:

• Security offerings from the Dell EMC Cyber Solutions Group, which creates custom solutions based on our products and services.

• Certified Specialist Infrastructure Security, through which we evaluate risk and prioritize changes based on business needs and shifting threats in the security landscape.

• Identification of all potential vulnerabilities and risks and their impact on the classroom and your critical data.

We then help you take the appropriate action and guide you in determining how to overcome your organizational and technical security gaps by implementing the right tools and technologies. By carefully assessing your environment, we help you better understand safety gaps and build your security operations correctly.

3 K–12 Best Practices for Cybersecurity and Physical Safety

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4 K–12 Best Practices for Cybersecurity and Physical Safety

Establish continuous visibility across endpoints and networks.Many schools still rely on aging infrastructures that are not equipped to stop today’s threats. Dell Technologies can help you develop a strategy to gain strong visibility across every endpoint in your IT environment. That plan can include:

• The implementation of technologies for managed, hosted endpoint threat detection

• Virtualized networking and data protection across data centers and cloud applications

• Solutions for managing strategic, operational, financial and digital risk

Adopt a cybersecurity framework to manage risk. To effectively mitigate risk, you need to adopt a comprehensive cybersecurity framework that maps your organizational needs to your safety and IT requirements. We can help you create a framework to establish a zero trust/least privileged security model for your distributed systems through products that assist you in building a secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. Our framework utilizes Dell Technologies tools and systems to provide a clearer view into your technology ecosystem, so you can improve risk management.

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5 K–12 Best Practices for Cybersecurity and Physical Safety

Develop a campus safety plan.Criminals use inconsistency or blind spots to gain access to buildings or sensitive data. Creating an updated campus safety plan is another key part of transforming K–12 safety. To develop the most effective plan for your school, you should clearly identify problem areas and risks and then determine the best way to prevent physical threats in each scenario and to respond quickly if an incident does occur. We can help you develop a strong safety plan:

Dell Technologies Video Surveillance PlatformDell Technologies can be a part of your plan by providing a robust video surveillance platform to protect students, teachers and employees and improve school campus safety overall. This platform takes advantage of the latest technology and is based on a proven Dell EMC architecture for simplifying testing, validation and deployment.

Consolidate resources to limit threat exposure.A key part of any successful security transformation is to limit complexity and thereby reduce the number of potential threats. We work with you to consolidate resources, whether in the data center or across the network, through hyperconverged infrastructure solutions as well as software-defined networking and security solutions that simplify your environment and eliminate redundancies. As a result, you can reduce your overall potential attack footprint.the latest technology and is based on a proven Dell EMC architecture for simplifying testing, validation and deployment.

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6 K–12 Best Practices for Cybersecurity and Physical Safety

Build a culture of security awareness.Security must be a priority that involves the people, processes and technologies in the district. Everyone in your school and school district must buy into your strategy—from the CIO to the students and parents.

Dell Technologies partners with you to facilitate better awareness of security concerns. We do this by:

• Conducting in-depth security and technology training for all school IT staff and administrators, teachers, students and parents

• Offering instruction in digital citizenship, teaching students to use technology responsibly and safely through a range of training and teaching tools.

The result is a deeper understanding of what’s at stake when it comes to school security.

Maintain good technology hygiene. Safeguarding student and organizational data and systems from theft, intrusion and malicious attacks is essential. Dell Technologies helps by assisting you in identifying and deploying the right tools for encryption, software patching, multi-factor authentication and password management enforcement.

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7 K–12 Best Practices for Cybersecurity and Physical Safety

Create secure and sophisticated firewalls. When it comes to today’s safety threats, many schools struggle to prevent breaches and malware from overwhelming their networks. Dell Technologies provides firewalls that block intrusions across all endpoints, networks and applications in your school or district. Our network security solutions can protect confidential and sensitive student and teacher data from viruses, spyware and other threats. We also provide firewalls that are embedded as a service in the hypervisor through a solution that ensures firewalls and policies stay with the appropriate application, no matter where the application is.

Continually monitor your networks.Network monitoring is a key to maintaining digital safety for your school. Using Dell Technologies security solutions, you can monitor and protect school networks from the classroom to the data center to the cloud. We provide an automated and unified solution using technologies such as VMware Workspace ONE Trust Network, which enables you to deliver continuous risk monitoring to secure employees, applications, endpoints and networks. Additionally, our Secureworks solution provides around-the-clock monitoring of your infrastructure, combining our technology and expertise to help you detect, investigate and act on valid security threats.

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10.Leverage technology to support campus safety.Once you have created and implemented an effective and comprehensive plan to ensure safety, you will need the right tools and technologies to get the most out of your campus safety program. Dell Technologies has them. We give you a holistic group of security solutions that can help drive your security transformation. These solutions include:

• Secure enterprise cloud technologies from Virtustream• Updates to Dell EMC VxRail, VxBlock and VxRack systems• Secureworks Advanced Endpoint Threat Detection• RSA Risk Framework, RSA Risk and Cybersecurity Practice,

and RSA SecurID Suite• Dell EMC–certified specialists in infrastructure security.

ConclusionTo be successful in the fight against threats to physical safety and technology, school districts must undergo a security transformation. K–12 IT departments need to work closely with administrators, students, teachers and parents to support a security strategy that manages and reduces risk.

Dell Technologies is well equipped to help schools transform security. We provide deep expertise in planning, insight and technology, and our security expertise and solutions can help you drive your transformation. By partnering with Dell Technologies and following our K–12 best practices for cybersecurity and physical safety, you can ensure safety and security for everyone and everything you want to protect—from the student to the data center.

8 K–12 Best Practices for Cybersecurity and Physical Safety

Contact your Dell Technologies representative today, so we can help you get started on your safety plan.

Visit Dellemc.com/k12

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*Source: “The State of K–12 Cybersecurity: 2018 Year in Review,” K–12 Cybersecurity Resource Center.