K-12 schools are struggling with cybersecurity — Here’s how a SIEM can help

These days, it’s not unusual for data conversations to focus around the word “petabytes.” Data usage is certainly not decreasing anytime soon. SIEM technology can aggregate all this information from any source and enable your IT team to find anomalies in real time — and thwart threats proactively, before they have time to affect learning or access student data. And because cyber threats often lurk in silos, a solution that can operate across all data types and systems is essential. 

School districts are competing with private sector organizations for IT and security talent and are frequently coming up short. Under-resourced teams have too much data to dig through on their own, making automation and data consolidation at scale absolutely essential — along with the ability to aggregate under a single view. 

This is where new AI capabilities can have considerable benefit for school districts. Features such as AI security assistants can quickly serve up critical context and information about threats in your environment, eliminating time spent researching and understanding threats. 

Additional features, like Elastic Attack Discovery, can use AI to triage cybersecurity alerts. Instead of having to manually look through hundreds of alerts, you’ll have them automatically organized and prioritized based on urgency. Features like this can save small teams considerable time and energy by focusing on only the most impactful threats, instead of drowning in constant alerts.

With a single unified agent, you can deepen host visibility, block ransomware and malware, streamline inspection, and invoke remote response action. This is crucial in a cybersecurity environment where every second counts in protecting student privacy and ensuring a secure learning environment.

There are a number of considerations to look out for when choosing your SIEM solution — such as how often you add data sources, the size of your team, and what your current processes look like. In addition to the more common factors, for K–12 schools specifically, we recommend keeping the following top of mind:

Many SIEM solutions — especially legacy SIEM solutions — only keep 30 days’ worth of data and force older data to “cold storage,” which gets very expensive and cumbersome to manage. When using logs for cybersecurity purposes, being able to quickly access past data can be incredibly helpful, as a cyber breach takes an average of 212 days to be detected.

K–12 cyber attacks often target endpoints, such as desktops and laptops, whose users may be unaware of sophisticated threats. Because of this risk, a SIEM should ideally work in tandem with an endpoint detection and response solution (EDR), leveraging the same data platform for unified visibility and response.

As your organization increases its data use, as it inevitably will, you can’t compromise on speed. When it comes to sensitive student data and powering student learning, every millisecond makes a difference. Consider not just how fast a SIEM solution is now with the data sources you currently use, but project how much data you may consume in the future and whether the speed will be affected by the increase. Plus, if you can’t search this data quickly, you’re wasting team resources. Most district IT teams don't have the luxury of restoring archives to the SIEM. In this case, having a searchable frozen tier is essential.

Pay attention to how a SIEM provider structures its fees. Many legacy SIEM platforms base licensing cost on the amount of daily storage you’re using. That pricing model will quickly become unmanageable for many districts that are experiencing a significant increase in log collections. Look for a flexible solution that will scale with your organization.

In recent years, AI advancements have enabled accelerated data onboarding and management. A modern SIEM should be able to leverage AI to make your team’s life easier by allowing them to submit queries in natural language and receive recommendations and context immediately.