Pictured front left is Bryan Ruzenski, Kristina Young, Laurel Di Fonzo, Tim Haas, Walter Snyder. Pictured back left is Mike Martinez, Larry Konig.
The Chester County Intermediate Unit (CCIU), a leading educational service agency in southeastern Pennsylvania, has forged an innovative partnership with Rubrik, a pioneering cloud data management company, and ePlus, a leading consultative technology solutions provider, to offer a managed immutable backup service to educational organizations. This groundbreaking service enables schools and educational institutions to secure their critical data using state-of-the-art technology, managed by CCIU’s expert cybersecurity team, at an affordable price.
CCIU technicians work closely with school IT staff to seamlessly connect to the service, configure backup jobs, and perform thorough test restores. By offloading the day-to-day maintenance and support of the system to CCIU, overworked school staff can focus on their core responsibilities, confident in the knowledge that their data is being safeguarded by professionals.
This service’s most significant advantage is CCIU’s role as an integral part of the organization’s incident response team, providing invaluable assistance in recovering from ransomware attacks and other data-destroying incidents. Since launching this service in 2020, CCIU has successfully helped two organizations recover from ransomware incidents, minimizing instructional time loss and averting the need to pay hefty ransoms.
With over 20 organizations already benefiting from this service, and more school leaders recognizing the near impossibility of recovering alone from cyber attacks, CCIU’s cybersecurity offering is rapidly gaining traction. As Bryan Ruzenski, Certified Education Technology Leader™ and director of external technology services at CCIU, stated, “Cybersecurity is a vast and complex subject, and educational organizations need support to handle it effectively. Educational service agencies (ESAs) are uniquely positioned to deliver the expertise, guidance, and technology that schools need to protect their data and quickly recover so their students are still able to learn, even if technology is compromised.”
Across the nation, other ESAs are following suit, offering similar cybersecurity services and technologies to support educational institutions in their efforts to protect student and staff data and ensure continuity of operations.
As technology continues to evolve and become more specialized, more consortiums and services are expected to launch in the coming months and years, providing educational organizations with the resources they need to leverage technology while mitigating associated risks.
