The education process has fastly moved forward in order to match all the standards of the progressing society, increasing the involvement of digitalization. Schools and universities are eager to provide their students with the latest IT technologies, which appeared to be obligatory during the pandemic situation with all the classes held online. This transition requests a large data flow, which has to be well-stored.
Eventually, due to the pandemic situation, the IT administrators in the whole education sector have become the silent heroes of the study process, as all the classes, seminars and lectures had to be transformed to the online format. But this is not the first IT challenge faced in this sphere; on the contrary, it revealed an even greater need for reliable data storage.
So what does it cost a single education institution to support the modern learning process? If you are a data storage or IT administrator in this exact sphere, you might know the answer.
Based on more than 20 years of experience working with data storage solutions worldwide, we decided to highlight the main challenges faced in the education sector in the area of data storage:
- Data storage and protection of big volumes of data.
- Protection against ransomware consequences.
- Improved file-sharing system.
- Cost-effectiveness of data storage solutions.
In this article, we are going to explain how these education data storage challenges should be resolved.
Scaling Volumes and Ensuring Data Protection for Education Data Storage
Remember the sheer volume of textbooks your teacher once collected? Today, all that content – multiplied by every student, their personal records, and countless digital materials like presentations, educational videos, online grade books, timetables, and digitized libraries – is processed digitally. This immense and diverse data, growing exponentially year after year, is essential for running any educational institution, from K-12 schools to large universities. Such vast and critical information absolutely demands robust and secure education data storage solutions that can handle unprecedented growth while ensuring data integrity and accessibility. These specialized education data storage solutions are not merely about safeguarding personal academic files; they are equally crucial for protecting critical administrative information, valuable research data, and ensuring operational continuity, forming the very backbone for a seamless and secure learning environment.
For example, with Open-E JovianDSS, you can store an unlimited amount of files, which will be safely stored on different security levels:
- All data can be protected from silent corruption with self-healing functionality.
- If you have an Open-E JovianDSS High Availability Cluster and, if you plan an update of the system or just have a damaged disk, the failover cluster functionality will redirect the work process to the mimicking node.
- Constant snapshots and backups on local or remote backup servers with any retention plan you choose can save you from any possible disaster (fire, flood, human error, ransomware). Having said that, by joining our On- & Off-site Data Protection, you can constantly access and restore previous data copies from primary server snapshots or backup servers in any location if the primary one is out of order.
Safeguarding Against Ransomware with Education Data Storage Solutions
Increasingly digitized academic landscape makes educational institutions represent a growing target for cybercriminals. Just as cheating can compromise academic integrity, ransomware in the digital world can paralyze an institution by seizing its data, fundamentally disrupting the core mission of learning and research. Unfortunately, the integrity and accessibility of education data storage have become frequent targets for these malicious attacks, leading to widespread operational shutdowns and devastating data loss. Many educational institutions are now grappling with this escalating problem. This is confirmed by the latest Blackfog report on ransomware from 2024/2025, which lists many educational institutions.
Among the many incidents, we can mention two:
- At the end of December 2024, PowerSchool, an educational software provider, fell victim to a ransomware attack, resulting in the disclosure of personal data in the United States and Canada. Hackers gained access to the customer service portal and stole confidential information from 6,505 school districts, including names, addresses, social security numbers, medical records, and grades. The attackers claimed to have obtained data on 62,488,628 students and 9,506,624 teachers, indicating a massive security breach.
- The ransomware attack on Topackt IT Solutions affected 45 schools in multiple cities and districts across Germany. The LockBit gang claimed responsibility, saying they stole 3 TB of data and set a ransom payment deadline of January 30. Topackt has not publicly confirmed the security breach or ransom demands.
But what can be done to prevent those tragic circumstances? With Open-E JovianDSS Backup functionality based on snapshots, there will be no need to worry.
If you have a retention plan properly set, the work efficiency of your institution will not suffer significant losses even during a ransomware attack. In case if the main server was encrypted, you will have the option to restore the data from the latest snapshots either created locally or recorded on the On- and/or Off-site Backup server. Due to the read-only format, this backup will not be affected by the encryption, and the data can be reverted from the snapshot or restored by creating a clone (additional volume) in the new environment.
Flexible and Secure File Sharing in Education Data Storage
Based on the way the whole education data storage is built (no matter if we talk about a school or a university), flexible and secure sharing data and information is one of the essential parts. But how to share large amounts of data and large-size files between all participants of the educational process without fear of loss or theft?
Thanks to its flexibility and scalability, Open-E JovianDSS can be adapted to any system architecture. It supports thousands of workstations in various environments, using connections based on specific file sharing protocols and user authentication for data transfer:
- SMB and/or NFS
- LDAP authentication or Active Domain
At the time of the pandemic situation, the use of additional services (eg. VPN, private cloud, etc.) for remote work to go beyond the educational institution’s building. Such services can be supported by mentioned NAS protocols or SAN protocols, like iSCSI and FC.
Additionally, all remote Open-E JovianDSS connections are encrypted so that the data will not be reached from a computer without granted access.
Optimizing Budgets with Scalable Education Data Storage Solutions
One might think that such a data storage system would not fit into the budget of a school or university. In fact, with Open-E JovianDSS, you can configure various structures and settings to precisely match the needs of your educational institution. This solution can include both a single node and a high-availability cluster with local and remote backup servers, providing the highest level of protection. In addition, the hardware- and hypervisor-agnostic architecture allows for increased savings on energy consumption and the ability to use various virtualization platforms.
Check out the Open-E JovianDSS Storage and RAID Calculator to see the best configuration for you and download your free trial today!
