New-Gen Apps for Easing Back-to-School IT Pains

IT departments at educational institutions are scrambling to adjust to the usual influx of devices, applications and roster data this time of year. Here are some tools designed to help.

In the classroom, textbooks and chalkboards are quickly being replaced by web-based education apps and one-to-one computing programs that enable any time, any place learning. Identity Automation’s RapidIdentity as a Services is a cloud-based identity and access management solution that provides students and teachers with single sign-on access to these modern teaching tools and securely automates the transfer of student roster data to digital textbook providers. With RapidIdentity, teachers and students can focus on teaching and learning, instead of troubleshooting technology issues. –James Litton, CEO, Identity Automation

Apple continues to raise the bar of what is possible with technology in education. As Macs and iPads become more common in schools, educational IT professionals need to be equipped with a best-of-breed tool to inventory, deploy and secure every Mac and iPad under their control. The right management solution can transform the classroom for students and teachers by allowing IT to quickly preconfigure and scale device programs, automate deployments of new software and configurations, and ensure data privacy without compromising security. JAMF Software’s Casper Suite is one of those solutions. –Dave Saltmarsh, educational evangelist, JAMF Software

With the growing adoption of Apple devices in education comes maintenance logistics as well as questions about security and privacy. JAMF Software’s Apple device management solution, the Casper Suite, allows both K-12 and higher education IT administrators to manage Apple devices efficiently and safely while addressing the endless inventory, security and varying department needs so that teachers can focus on teaching and students can focus on learning. –Dave Saltmarsh, educational evangelist JAMF Software

Higher-education institutions face a number of unique information security challenges. The Annual BitSight Insights Industry Benchmark Report consistently finds that the security performance of the education sector drops when students arrive on campus in the fall and improves when the students leave for the summer. Education also tends to have lower security performance compared with other industries. However, there are some innovative, new solutions to this issue. –Stephen Boyer, co-founder and CTO, BitSight Technologies

With small security teams, limited budgets and a seasonal threat landscape, IT teams are tasked with protecting large networks containing important intellectual property and sensitive personal data. These networks are often vulnerable to peer-to-peer file-sharing activity, making them an attractive target for malware, botnets and other cyber-attacks. BitSight uses publicly available data to provide objective, daily ratings of any organization’s security performance, enabling educational institutions to manage third-party risk and benchmark their own security effectiveness. –Stephen Boyer, co-founder and CTO, BitSight Technologies

Higher education is tasked with unique storage needs: supporting an active research community that generates new data at massive scale while taking on the burden of archiving and curating billions of digital files, petabytes in size, for posterity. Qumulo Core—data-aware, scale-out network-attached storage—allows education facilities to create a storage architecture that can scale in overall size and quantity of files as needed, adapt to the individual needs of research and archival departments, and provide granular analytics enabling cataloging and curating of all stored data. Qumulo Core is able to provide higher education institutions with a solution that uses commodity hardware and is optimized for performance and capacity, a key component when making petabytes of hot, warm and cold data available to research groups, faculty, students and the public. –Chris Hoffman, senior product marketing manager, Qumulo

Educational institutions face the same privacy and security challenges as the enterprise. Kaseya VSA is an integrated IT systems management platform that incorporates key management capabilities into a single platform to streamline and automate IT services. By adopting Kaseya VSA, educational IT leaders can remotely monitor entire school IT ecosystems, efficiently manage the growing number of mobile devices and apps while still maintaining system-wide performance and security, and automate repetitive and time-consuming administrative tasks. Additionally, it enables secure access to all campus-owned IT systems, alerts for activity that deviates from predefined security policies, and provides automatic discovery and updates to systems that are out of compliance. –Dana Epp, CTO, Kaseya

In order to use all the new educational IT tools now available, a wireless networking platform is needed to connect the school with students, and that helps teachers engage them by delivering a more personalized level of instruction. Aerohive is an innovative enterprise wireless company that enables education institutions to use the power of mobility to increase productivity and engage students in new ways. The Aerohive solution uses the power of the cloud and a distributed architecture to deliver scalable, simple, secure and smarter networks to transform every classroom into a connected classroom. –Abby Strong, director of product marketing, Aerohive Networks