IT Asset Management for K12 Device Programs
IT Lifecycle Management for K12 Classrooms
The cost of new devices can be a lot to manage at once, making it difficult for schools to keep up with the best equipment trends given their limited budgets. Schools often find themselves spread thin with outdated or broken devices, putting students at a disadvantage when it comes to having quality tools to learn with. Designing, purchasing, managing, and disposing of technology is an ongoing process for education administrators.
To create a system where technology reliably and sustainably enhances teaching and learning, schools need to be able to identify what they need now, and predict what they will need in the future so that they can plan accordingly. IT lifecycle management is a strategy for getting the most out of every device.
IT lifecycle management relies on IT professionals overseeing the people and processes that keep tech systems running smoothly; from purchasing all new devices, to disposing of them when they cannot function at optimal capacity. Investing in lifecycle management reduces maintenance costs and helps improve security by keeping patches up-to-date and vulnerabilities at bay.
Managing Cyberattacks on Schools
School districts across the country are experiencing a security crisis. According to Microsoft Security Intelligence, of the over 7.7 million enterprise malware events that happen every month, more than 60% come from the education sector. As schools have depended on remote learning for nearly two years now, cybercriminals have identified new opportunities for targeting schools.
In a public service announcement in April 2020, the FBI released a warning against cybercriminals taking advantage of the shift to distance learning, and the influx of phishing campaigns that arose because of the shift. Several districts have had their systems and their students’ personal information held hostage for significant sums of money. It’s easy for a student or a teacher to naively click the wrong link, and accidentally throw their entire district into chaos. In response to this evolving threat, schools all over the country are seeking solutions that will provide them with secure IT operations and simplify their IT management.
Choosing the Right IT Management Solution for Your School District
IT lifecycle management is a challenge any time you’re supporting a large number of devices and end-users: each machine needs to be kept up to date with the latest security patches and updates, each machine needs regular maintenance, and when devices reach the end of viability, each needs to be decommissioned and replaced.
The IT staff of any school district needs certain IT capabilities to keep students' data safe and IT systems operating smoothly. IT Systems need to be able to authenticate users, maintain security settings, monitor network activity, increase efficiency in device management by deploying endpoint protection agents to all managed clients, track IT asset usage and ownership, automate IT tasks, create reports on IT activities—all from a central location. In short, the system should provide complete visibility across the entire IT environment.
Today, many solutions have made mobile and remote device management more straightforward. Still, most of them are specific to particular platforms whose use might not be as widespread in your district. District administrators need to keep in mind that adopting mobile carts and 1-to-1 programs is a helpful but inadequate device management strategy. Provisioning and authenticating devices before they’re deployed on the school district network is an extra step in the right direction.
Some of the more advanced mobile device management solutions available for schools today provide functionality for application usage monitoring, device tracking, application blacklisting and whitelisting, and data and password encryption enforcement. Ensure that the program you’re using covers all device types regardless of the operating system in use.
The following are some of the benefits of implementing an IT lifecycle management system in the K12 classroom:
● Allows IT staff to manage IT assets throughout their lifecycle, reducing IT maintenance costs
● Manages application distribution
● Enforces data encryption on removable media
● Audits compliance with IT policies like password protection
● Enables IT to lock, wipe, or locate missing devices remotely
● Allows administrators to set up automatic updates across all devices
● Simplifies IT tasks by removing fragmentation, duplication of effort, and lack of management oversight.
● Enables rapid access to centralized information about your devices for simplified device deployment, inventory auditing, asset disposal, and overall security
● Provides mobile device management (MDM) solutions that consolidate mobile applications into a single easy-to-manage console
Vanguard’s Lifecycle Management Service
For district-level educators, managing hundreds or even thousands of computers is a tremendously expensive and challenging task. It is a tremendous advantage to be able to order computers that are ready for the classroom, with security and software already configured and device IDs ready to upload into your asset management software.
Vanguard has developed cloud-based Asset Management Solutions that deliver essential data into the hands of decision-makers. Vanguard understands that management today needs immediate data access and transparency on the technology assets for which they are responsible.
Our Asset Management Solutions track and monitor assets assigned to users or locations, deployment status, collect signed documents for receipts, use policies, or security requirements, and see real-time inventory and asset utilization. It also offers comprehensive reporting capabilities to share information with other stakeholders and flexible API integration to exchange data with other key systems. We strongly believe that no other IT Partner offers anything comparable in our marketplace.
Contact us today and see how our Asset Management Solutions can save your school district valuable time and resources.