The Future of K-12 Education

Parents and communities place the highest degree of trust in local educational agency (LEA) schools to not only educate their children, but also to keep their children safe. LEA instructional and technology leaders are innovative and tireless in managing this enormous responsibility—and at ConvergeOne, so are we. Inspired by the mission of educators, we develop solutions for academic equity, student access, ransomware readiness, and other matters of concern to school leaders, including:

In my previous blog post, I promised more guidance on the next steps to consider taking now, while the pandemic is still upon us. Here are eight actions CISOs should consider taking.

Given the already-expanded attack surface, in my estimation it is never too early to look at lessons learned from the pandemic—and there certainly isn’t a shortage of teachable moments, right from the top down. Here are eight lessons for Directors of Security and CISOs whose organizations and livelihoods have been imperiled by the pandemic.

When employees were first sent to work from home, organizations scrambled to provide work-from-home software, devices, and infrastructure. As we transition to a new normal, it’s now important to reevaluate the initial infrastructure laid to support remote workers against a lasting, best-practice architecture. In the last entry, I shared the first three pillars for a thriving remote workforce. Let’s now explore the final three pillars.

Pandemic this, COVID that… enough already, right? The situation was supposed to be temporary, but is it really? Many organizations I’m working with now are in a planning phase, and they aren’t planning for everyone to return to the office.

There is an old saying: “Make your first crisis not be a real one.” Never has that been more apropos than during the past few months, with the COVID-19 (coronavirus) lockdown and shelter-in-place restrictions that most Americans have lived under. Now, we have lived in crisis situations before, and COVID-19 is not going to be our last or only pandemic, but it has been unique because of its universal impact, with almost no one spared; its duration; and the tidal wave of change it has brought about in the way we conduct work, socialize, access information, participate in the political process, and protect ourselves both physically and virtually.

Operating a remote workforce is no longer just a remote possibility. A work-from-home war is being quietly waged across many organizations throughout the country, as workers who were forced to quickly establish home office environments now wish to remain in their home rather than return to commuting to an office. This tipping point has deep and wide ramifications for organizations attempting to return to pre-COVID-19 productivity levels. 

As the world struggles with the fallout from COVID-19, all aspects of life are quickly changing. Millions of workers are now working from home or other remote locations outside of the normal security configurations of an office. Fraudsters are taking advantage of this disruption to actively steal information that they can monetize. In many cases, companies were not prepared to deal with a large work-from-home workforce, and when they transitioned their employees to remote environments, they mainly considered threats like phishing or cyberattacks.

Zoom: Perception vs. Reality

Negative Press:

We have undoubtedly all heard the many reports questioning the security readiness of Zoom as of late. Are there impactful vulnerabilities, and is Zoom safe? We have even seen negative fallout due to some of the reported concerns. For example, the New York City school system has banned the use of Zoom as a direct result of the perceived security flaws within the Zoom platform. The problem is, much of what we are hearing is more about perception than reality, and the challenge is to sift through the facts versus fiction.

By now, you are in the midst of working from home and trying to define what the “new normal” looks like for you and your family. Reflecting on what that has looked like for me over the course of the past month, I noticed some details that raised my level of concern.