Whether you support K-12 schools, colleges, or universities, sensitive information can accumulate across file shares, employee workstations, databases, cloud storage, websites, and other systems. Knowing where that information resides is an important first step toward protecting it.
Seeker helps education IT and security teams discover sensitive data across their environments so they can better understand where regulated, confidential, or otherwise high-risk information is being stored.
Why does sensitive-data discovery matter in education?
Educational institutions handle a broad range of sensitive information, including student records, financial-aid information, employee data, payment information, research data, and credentials.
Several requirements may influence how that information is handled:
- FERPA protects the privacy of student education records and gives parents and eligible students specific rights concerning access to and disclosure of those records.
- GLBA and the Safeguards Rule are particularly important for institutions participating in federal Title IV student-aid programs. The U.S. Department of Education states that participating institutions agree to comply with the GLBA Safeguards Rule and must protect covered student financial-aid information.
- PCI-DSS applies where institutions store, process, or transmit payment account data. The current PCI DSS version is 4.0.1.Compliance requirements vary by institution, but they share a practical challenge: it is difficult to protect information when you do not know where copies of it have been stored.
Sensitive data can appear almost anywhere
Student and employee information can move well beyond the system where it originated. Spreadsheets, exported reports, downloaded files, departmental databases, shared folders, old workstations, cloud storage, and research systems can all contain copies that are difficult for central IT to track.
This is where sensitive-data discovery becomes useful. Rather than relying only on where information is supposed to be stored, security teams can search the environment for where it actually exists.
How Seeker helps
Seeker can centrally scan supported Windows and Mac systems, SMB file shares, relational databases, websites, Microsoft OneDrive, and other supported sources. Administrators can use built-in detection patterns or create custom patterns for institution-specific data.
Seeker’s licensing model also avoids per-target charges, which can be particularly valuable in education environments containing large numbers of endpoints, servers, shares, and databases.
Qualifying educational and non-profit organizations are also eligible for discounted licensing.
Ready to see what is in your environment? Start with a free 30-day trial of Seeker.