Cybersecurity for Educational Institutions
Protecting institutional integrity through enterprise encryption
Protecting institutional integrity through enterprise encryption
Educational organizations are responsible for highly sensitive data like student records and faculty research. They must also facilitate student payments, issue ID cards, and maintain compliance with regulations like FERPA and PCI DSS.
Futurex provides the following hardware-based encryption solutions as a one-stop-shop for educational institutions, deployable on-premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid solution:
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requires that educational institutions strictly control access to student data. Any time student data is shared without encryption measures in place, FERPA compliance – and the federal funding that can accompany it – is at risk.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a compliance standard that articulates best practices for IT security. To comply with PCI DSS, educational institutions are encouraged to adopt risk-based cybersecurity measures to prevent academic data breaches.
Educational institutions have many cybersecurity responsibilities, such as protecting academic records, authenticating high-value faculty research, and maintaining security protocols across entire campuses or districts. As an added challenge, institutions must maintain FERPA or PCI DSS compliance while dealing with decentralized cryptographic infrastructures. Other challenges:
Futurex provides hardware security modules (HSMs) and key management servers with tamper-proof controls. You can deploy them on-premises, in the cloud, or both. Futurex HSMs encrypt, transmit, and store data by using advanced algorithms. Key management services establish a public key infrastructure (PKI) and a certificate authority (CA) for digital certificates and signing. Futurex provides the following solutions:
Tokenization means replacing data with randomized strings during storage and transmission. Futurex goes one step further with vaultless tokenization, eliminating token storage databases, or vaults. This reduces PCI compliance scope and provides better security.
Using Futurex enterprise key management servers, educational organizations can establish a PKI to secure private keys and create a root certificate authority (CA). The offline root certificate establishes a working certificate that can digitally sign and authenticate academic data.
All Futurex HSMs are certified secure cryptographic devices (SCDs). They come with both logical controls as well as physical tamper-proof and tamper-responsiveness. They offer full redundancy and disaster recovery and are FIPS 140-2 Level 3-validated by design.
Any cryptographic function. Any size. Any scale. Any location.
Any depository of personal student information, such as academic records or personally identifiable information, has a high value on the black market. Futurex offers tokenization solutions that reduce risk while maintaining access for authorized users to keep this sensitive data secure. Rather than store important data in the clear, tokenization utilizes identifying text strings, or tokens, for storage. To retrieve stored data, send the relevant token to a hardware security module (HSM), which securely returns the requested data.
Research requires large investments in time and resources to produce valuable findings, often at the expense of governmental agencies and other funding bodies. As a result, some individuals and organizations seek to complicate such investments by accessing and sometimes sabotaging the research of others. To ensure the authenticity of research, Futurex provides digital signing services through the KMES Series 3 or Excrypt Series, devices capable of providing asymmetric keys and certificates for document authentication.
Futurex card issuance and management solutions provide institutions with fast, convenient, and secure production of both prepaid and identification cards. You can use these cards to increase the convenience and security of on-campus transactions and identity authentication.