Safeguarding K-12 Education: A Whole-of-State Approach to Cybersecurity for Chromebook-Centric School Districts

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, K-12 school districts are harnessing the power of technology to transform education. The widespread adoption of Chromebooks has revolutionized the learning process, providing students with tools for collaboration, research and creativity. However, along with these advancements come unprecedented cybersecurity challenges that demand a comprehensive strategy. Enter the whole-of-state approach — a game-changing path toward combined efforts, shared information and collaboration, and funding opportunities that empowers school district administrations to fortify their cybersecurity defenses and protect student data against evolving cyber threats.

By partnering with CrowdStrike and using the power of the Falcon platform to build a whole-of-state strategy that helps protect against sophisticated attacks, secure sensitive data, and address staffing and budget challenges, school IT leaders can customize a solution that fits the unique relationship between a state and a school district. Now, they can also extend powerful endpoint protection and security management with CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight for ChromeOS, the industry’s first endpoint detection and response (EDR)/extended detection and response (XDR) offering to deliver visibility and threat detection for ChromeOS devices without the need for a mobile device management (MDM) solution.

With Falcon Insight for ChromeOS, school districts gain multiple benefits:

Understanding the Landscape: With Chromebooks becoming an integral part of modern classrooms, school districts are digitally interconnected like never before. This increased connectivity opens doors to potential vulnerabilities, making it imperative for administrators to adopt a holistic perspective on cybersecurity. A whole-of-state strategy encourages collaboration between schools, local governments and relevant agencies to pool resources, share insights and collectively build a robust defense system.

Strengthening Defenses: A whole-of-state-focused plan emphasizes the importance of implementing multifaceted security measures. From firewalls and anti-malware software to secure browsing practices, school districts need to create layers of defense that extend across devices, networks and applications. By sharing information with state-level cybersecurity experts, school administrations can tailor these measures to the unique challenges they face.

Educating Stakeholders: A significant aspect of the whole-of-state value proposition is the emphasis on education. Cybersecurity awareness campaigns can help students, teachers and parents recognize potential threats and adopt safe online practices. School districts can collaborate with state authorities to develop comprehensive training that empowers the education community to become proactive guardians of their digital spaces.

Achieving Data Protection and Privacy: Securing sensitive student data is paramount. A whole-of-state strategy encourages school districts to collaborate with state-level data protection agencies to establish strict protocols for data handling, storage and sharing. By prioritizing privacy and compliance, educators can confidently integrate technology into the learning process while safeguarding student information.

Enabling Rapid Response and Recovery: In the event of a cyber incident, timely response is essential. By working together with a collaborative strategy, state security teams can ensure that school districts have access to expert guidance and resources for managing breaches effectively. Collaborating with state cybersecurity centers empowers districts with the tools needed to swiftly detect, contain and recover from cyberattacks.

Future-Proofing Technology: As technology evolves, so do cyber threats. A whole-of-state strategy encourages ongoing assessment of security measures to stay ahead of potential risks. Collaborating with state-level cybersecurity experts provides school districts with up-to-date insights and solutions, ensuring that their defenses remain effective against emerging threats.

Building a Resilient Community: At its core, the whole-of-state approach cultivates a resilient cybersecurity community. By fostering collaboration between school districts, state agencies and cybersecurity professionals, educators can collectively tackle challenges and share best practices. This collaborative spirit not only strengthens individual districts but also contributes to a statewide culture of cybersecurity awareness and readiness.

Chromebooks Have Transformed Modern-Day Classrooms

ChromeOS device usage among students, teachers and families is growing exponentially, and these versatile devices are now a key part of the classroom and the learning experience. With personal technology available to every student, participation increases, where students can learn in a way that is most effective for them through interactive apps and tools that can be adapted to a student’s learning style. Communication with teachers and other students is easier, assignments and grades are available right away, students can learn at their own pace, and access to knowledge and information is now right at their fingertips. And while familiarity with technology builds student skills for success in the future and helps prepare them for a future career, cybersecurity awareness and trust that their private information and communications are secure is also crucial. The success of ChromeOS devices like Chromebooks can be attributed to built-in security, simple management and premium performance.

Chromebooks and other ChromeOS devices are designed to be secure by default, making them valuable trusted tools for IT and security teams. But just like the rest of their fleet, security teams need visibility into these devices and the ability to implement uniform security policies. This is especially important because of the popularity of ChromeOS for remote learning, homework, communications with teachers and collaboration with other students and also because of its broad adoption by school IT administrators due to its deployment features such as zero-touch enrollment. No matter where the device is, security teams need unified visibility across all their devices in one place to defend students and staff from potential security risks that could disrupt learning.

A New Approach for a New Year

With CrowdStrike Falcon Insight for ChromeOS, school districts and school administrators will benefit from CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR’s industry-leading detection and response capabilities and extend their efforts to stop breaches across ChromeOS, Linux, macOS and Windows devices, all from the unified CrowdStrike Falcon® console.

The Falcon platform is the first security platform to ingest XDR events natively collected by ChromeOS. By working closely with the ChromeOS team, IT and security teams can enable monitoring without deploying any new agents to ChromeOS devices. Teams now have broad visibility across different devices in the unified Falcon console and can be up and running quickly after adding ChromeOs devices in minutes — not hours or days.

A whole-of-state approach is a transformative strategy that empowers K-12 school districts to address the cybersecurity needs and challenges posed by the widespread adoption of Chromebooks. By forging partnerships with state-level entities and leveraging this new feature across the state organizations, educators can enhance their defenses, educate stakeholders, safeguard student data and build a resilient community capable of effectively countering evolving cyber threats. Embracing this approach, school district administrations can pave the way to a safer and more secure digital learning environment where students can thrive without compromise.

Learn more in our new eBook, 5 Easy Steps for School Cybersecurity.

Additional Resources

• Learn more about CrowdStrike’s approach to whole-of-state security.
• Learn more about the benefits of CrowdStrike Falcon Insight XDR.
• Learn how CrowdStrike redefines modern security to protect students, faculty and staff both on and off campus.