Education

Map where student and family information is collected, shared, retained, and deleted. Include student information systems, learning platforms, transport services, counseling tools, and informal spreadsheets. Highly sensitive records should not remain broadly accessible simply because a platform makes sharing convenient.

Use Cerberus within approved data-protection workflows and Spark to support privacy review. Limit access according to role and reassess it as students graduate or staff change responsibilities. Counsel and privacy leaders should interpret applicable requirements; not every record or institution is governed by the same combination of rules.

• Remove unnecessary historical exports and duplicate datasets.
• Review applications that receive student information through integrations.

Identify the external providers whose failure or compromise would affect attendance, teaching, payroll, communications, or access to records. Review administrative authentication, vendor support access, incident notification terms, and data return or deletion provisions. Know who can disable an integration during an incident.

Librarian and Relay can support inventory and integration review with limited permissions. Argus can inform investigations involving exposed credentials, but alerts require corroboration. Do not assume a provider's security statement covers your configuration, staff practices, or locally stored copies of exported information.

• Require strong authentication for administrative and remote access.
• Assign an institutional owner to each critical vendor relationship.

Exercise outages during enrollment, examinations, payroll, and other high-pressure periods. Define practical alternatives for attendance, family communications, accommodation records, and safeguarding responsibilities. Ensure sensitive information is not exposed through improvised workarounds.

Dewey can help coordinate recovery planning and Growler can support evidence preservation. School or university leadership must approve consequential containment, notifications, and public statements. Test restoration of representative records and identity services, then document what staff need to reconcile after systems return. Give administrators a short, usable escalation process rather than relying on a lengthy policy.

• Keep protected recovery copies separate from everyday administration.
• Include IT, academic leadership, privacy, communications, and student support in exercises.