The cloud has elevated business into a new era. What was once primarily associated with online storage has now become a landscape for platforms like Microsoft Azure, where businesses can streamline operations, boost collaboration and adapt to changing demands. Embracing the cloud is becoming essential to overcome modern challenges and maintain ongoing growth and success.
"Data is not the new oil - it's the new plutonium. Amazingly powerful, dangerous when it spreads, difficult to clean up and with serious consequences when improperly used."
Jim Balsillie (2019)
2020 marked a year of massive disruption. During this time, digital capabilities rapidly improved and technology and tools transformed the way education has had to work. Teaching remotely was challenging for many reasons, not least of which was the inherent ‘disconnect’ teaching staff experienced in no longer being able to interact with students or colleagues in person. One outcome of this has been that alongside the continuing focus on measuring growth, schools are increasingly concerned with measuring ‘engagement’, whether it was within their student cohorts, their communities and importantly, their teaching staff.
How confident is your organisation with safeguarding important information from corruption, compromise, or loss?
Whether you’re trying to solve a technology problem or you’re about to begin a major IT project, the planning phase is critical and guess what? Your experience planning curriculum is transferable to IT planning and projects as well. In this blog post, I’ll walk through a few key steps for nailing the planning for a complex project.
Even before COVID, an organisation’s obligation to safeguard its data had never been greater. Not only do you have to collect, store, process and discard data in ways that are compliant with regulations, you also need to have strong information security policies and practices to protect your data from malicious or unauthorised use.
While Covid seems to have stretched time making six months feel like a decade, it wasn’t actually that long ago that the pandemic hit us and we had to scramble to set up remote learning and distribute our workforces. We digitised en masse and that well-trodden adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” could be seen virtually (boom, boom) everywhere.
There isn’t one rule that fits all organisations for privacy risk management; it comes down to the contexts, needs and priorities of the organisations itself. In a recent webinar I attended, it was stated that risk management generally leads to one of three outcomes:
Historically, there have been two types of digital transformations in education. The first type is disruptive technology change. This is usually driven by the emergence of a new technology or an event. For example, the invention of laptops, followed by iPads, then the explosion of 1:1 device programs at every level of education - this has changed education irrevocably. History will tell if COVID is one of these types of catalysts. The swift move to technology dependent, remote learning has given educators a taste of change, a taste of what’s possible. Some are starting to adopt that ‘taste’ as their norm, others are using it to supplement their current practice.
According the OAIC statistics, phishing attacks have increased considerably in the past three months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Three in five data breaches have been caused through malicious or criminal attacks; with data breaches resulting from phishing continuing to be the leading source of malicious attacks.
In early 2020, everyday life as we knew it was flipped as governments worldwide forced the closure of most things we take for granted, including businesses, sporting and cultural events, travel and schools. Parents had to stay home with their children, while educators were pushed to move their teaching programs to the online world.
Restricted travel due to COVID-19 is already having a well-documented impact on Australian universities. With their existing digital infrastructure, most have strategies and technologies in place to support students studying remotely. K-12 schools are likely to be impacted in one way or another in the coming months but established systems and practices to support fully online remote study are rare.
With remote learning becoming the 'new norm' for schools in response to the recent virus pandemic, the adoption of remote learning differs from school to school. This is influenced largely by the current adoption of technology already taking place within the school's learning environment, together with the capacity and confidence of its teaching staff.
More often than not, RTG are brought in to schools to help confirm a hunch the Leadership Team has regarding everyday operations and business improvement. This hunch is usually based on thoughts of inefficiency and/or ineffectiveness in everyday school practice - either in or out of the classroom. Whatever their suspicions, they know it's having a negative impact on their staff and students.
Students today consume media in ways and amounts never before seen in human history. According to Sensis, 1 in 3 Australians go to social media for news on current affairs, with 40% of consumers in the 18-29 age group looking to platforms such as Facebook for their daily news.
It take's a great deal of effort and collaboration to create and nurture a school's digital culture. Educational Technology ("EdTech") is a rapidly evolving ecosystem of networked technology, all contributing to the rise of the Educational Data Economy.
When discussing cyber risk and digital security, schools may lack the expertise needed to build the essential policies, structures and systems to create a learning environment that is securely technology-enabled.
Decades after the explosion of information technology, organisations anywhere in the world are re-evaluating the cost-benefit of IT Outsourcing and the forces that drive it.
IT outsourcing. Discover why old is new.
Website hosting security is now more important than ever. With more businesses turning digital comes the need for a clampdown on data protection. Let’s take a look at the recent ABS Census debacle, where poor security measures and inadequate hosting meant that the site crashed during its most critical period.
