Protecting Student Data Through Smarter Vendor Risk Management

Recent breaches involving Canvas and PowerSchool, resulting in the theft of millions of individuals’ private information, have intensified attention on third-party technology risk in K–12 education environments. The incidents underscore that a district can protect its own environment and still be exposed through a vendor — a risk difficult to contain when the average district relies on thousands of ed tech tools, many delivered through Software as a Service (SaaS). While small IT teams cannot investigate every provider with the resources of an enterprise security organization, they can build…