Providing a Safe Learning Environment

Schools are increasingly making use of online tools such as Office365, Google Classroom and educational applications hosted on AWS or Azure. There is also formal collaboration and sharing of systems between schools, and provisioning of Internet access to staff and students. Whilst these assist in providing a modern and stimulating curriculum, they can expose children, staff and school assets to cyber threats.

The government’s Prevent and Safeguarding agenda goes some way to help schools minimise their exposure to cyber threats through recommending the use of content filters and blocking of inappropriate content. However, the nature of modern threats means content filters and firewalls alone cannot always identify whether something is harmful or not. For example a new variety of malware which has just been released and does not yet have an antivirus signature.

Another example is where schools are collaborating with each other and malware is passed via a trusted connection to another school without passing through a firewall or content filter.