Top 3 ISO 27001 Certification Benefits for the Education Sector – Does Your School Need It?

These days, the educational sector has to handle numerous amounts of data. Most educational institutes nowadays are based on confidential information about their faculty members, students, stakeholders, and employees, including academic records, sensitive research data, finances, and personal details. With cyberattacks and breaches becoming more frequent than ever, schools and colleges must adopt robust information security measures, such as ISO 27001 to protect the data. Numerous ISO 27001 certification benefits for the educational sector may help your school.

Let’s dive into the below blog post to discuss more about ISO 27001 certification for educational institutions.

What is the ISO 27001 standard?

The ISO 27001 standard is recognized internationally for ISMS (Information Security Management Systems).

Having ISO 27001 in place confirms that you take serious measures to protect your sensitive data from data breaches and cyberattacks.

Implementing the ISO 27001 standard in your process provides you with a set of comprehensive frameworks to manage and protect sensitive information of your educational institution.

How can obtaining an ISO 27001 certification benefit your school?

When it comes to obtaining an ISO 27001 certification, the first sector that comes to our mind is online business or eCommerce.

But did you know that ISO 27001 can also be an essential ISO standard for the educational sector?

Well, getting your school certified with ISO 27001 can come with a lot of benefits.

The following are some of the most common benefits of obtaining an ISO 27001 certification for schools:

Benefit – 1: For People

1.Establishing roles and responsibilities

Having ISO 27001 in place helps you define and communicate the roles and responsibilities for information security.

It further helps you highlight the critical roles that the employees should play to identify potential ISMS risks and maintain data security across organizational levels.

2.Offering regular security awareness training

Implementing ISO 27001 in your procedures helps you roll out continual improvement training programs.

It’ll help you educate your staff(s) and students on common security issues, such as malicious and inbound attacks, what is considered sensitive data, and how to securely share data.

3.Introducing non-intrusive tech

Obtaining the ISO 27001 certification helps your school provide people with user-friendly tools to give them a nudge in the right direction when sharing sensitive data securely to avoid small yet costly mistakes.

Integrating solutions such as CMS and existing email clients can also help you streamline workflow and provide an in-the-moment alert about potential ISMS errors, such as sharing sensitive data with the wrong recipient or failing to use BCC when sending an email.

Benefit – 2: For Technology

1.Using secure communication channels and tools

Getting your educational institute certified with ISO 27001 can help you limit the communication channels and platforms with features guarding against data breaches.

Dealing with limited communication platforms can further simplify security by limiting variables.

It further helps you to keep pace with changes easily, as you’ll only deal with tools and channels that fall under the safety net.

Having ISO 27001 in place can also help you ensure that the email client is appropriate with relevant tools and encryption protocols.

3.Implementing access controls

Achieving an ISO 27001 certification can help you implement technologies in your processes with proper controls to ensure that only authorized individuals can access any sensitive information.

4.Incorporating tools for auditing and reporting

Obtaining an ISO 27001 certification can ensure that your data is protected through authorized access to tools and data to identify, manage, and control during the event of a data loss event.

It further ensures that your educational organization’s data protection leaders take the required steps to meet your ISO 27001 compliance responsibilities, mitigating unnecessary repercussions, and controlling the event.

Benefit – 3: For Processes

1.Developing procedures and policies

Having ISO 27001 in place can help your educational institution create and maintain procedures and policies to plug security gaps (if any) and align with the latest information security standards.

You should review and update these documents regularly to adapt to new changes and threats.

2.Performing a risk assessment process

Implementing the ISO 27001 standard in your business process can help your school conduct a comprehensive risk assessment to map the current security system of your educational institute and pinpoint vulnerabilities (if any) to identify the threats that have the potential to impact your organizational data.

You must adhere to the latest regulatory, legal, and contractual obligations during the assessment.

Performing a risk assessment can further help your school to ISO 27001 standard compliance.

3.Creating a plan for incident response

Getting your educational institution certified with the ISO 27001 standard can also help you create an effective response plan to manage any data breaches swiftly and compliantly before they take place.

It further provides your school with a competitive advantage over other schools and helps you gain more students and dedicated faculty members when needed.

How to find the right third-party ISO 27001 specialists for your school?

In today’s world, everything depends on data, even in the education sector.

Organizations with an ISO 27001 certification can leverage numerous benefits compared to other schools without any ISO 27001 certification.

Hence, you may find lots of third-party ISO 27001 auditing firms across the world.

However, let us tell you that not all of them are the same, even though they offer similar services across the world.

Well, considering the following factors can help you find the right third-party ISO 27001 specialists for your educational organization:

 

1.Check the expertise and skills of the third-party ISO 27001 auditing team

2.Ask the team what they know about the latest ISO 27001 standard

3.Ensure that the team you’re hiring is aware of the latest ISO 27001 standard requirements and guidelines

4.Ask the team about the estimated budget and timeline for the latest ISO 27001 standard certification process

5.Check the customer testimonials and portfolio on ISO 27001 implementation

6.Look for the ISO certifications and qualifications of the third-party ISO 27001 auditors

 

Take away

Are you wondering about whether your school needs to get certified with ISO 27001 or not? Well, implementing the ISO 27001 standard in your school processes can bring lots of benefits. One of the key ISO 27001 certification benefits is enhanced digital security. However, it isn’t the only reason to get your school ISO 27001 certified. We hope this blog post with the above-pointed factors can help you understand that.