Best Practice For Keeping Your Data Safe
Some suggestions about keeping private information about your staff, students and caregivers safe
Posted on Tuesday 21 January, 2020
With the end of the year right around the corner, we thought it would be a good time for you to talk with your technicians and staff about certain security requirements. KAMAR holds a lot of private information about your staff, students and their caregivers. This information, along with anything else of a sensitive nature that your school may be storing somewhere in your school's network, needs to be kept safe.
Here are some of our best ideas - practical, sensible ways that you can help to keep information safe.
Stand Alone Copies of KAMAR
Keep very tight control over who gets a copy of your KAMAR files, and for how long. To one way of thinking, having stand-alone copies of your school's KAMAR sitting around the place poses a very great security risk for your school!
One of the biggest advantages of using KAMAR is that the files are safely hosted on a server that is under your school's control, protected by all the securities and safety measures that are in place around your school's network (if your school uses KAMAR's hosted services, then the server is under our control, protected by us). Even your backups for KAMAR are safely stored away.
Sometimes people like to take a stand-alone copy of your school's KAMAR files, for various reasons (for example, they are going to Conference or a KAMAR workshop). It is important to realise that as soon as you put a copy of your school's KAMAR files onto a staff member's laptop, those files are not protected by any of the safety measures that are around your school's network. That could mean that anyone with access to that laptop could potentially gain access to all of your school's private information.
Our advice is: don't give out stand-alone copies of KAMAR to anyone, unless absolutely necessary. When you do judge it necessary, make sure that the staff member understands that they are responsible for protecting the information contained in those files. And when the need for the stand-alone copy has passed, destroy the stand-alone copy.
Update Staff Access
The end of the year tends to be when schools experience the most change in staffing. Remember to disable the logons for any staff who leave your school, to prevent any unintentional access to private information.
For new staff joining your school, consider how and when you give them access to your KAMAR.
Staff Passwords
Encourage your staff to change the passwords they use to log into KAMAR. This is something that should be reviewed more often, but for convenience, the end of the year is a perfect time!
You can review the rules in your school's KAMAR for minimum password complexity by going to Setup > Users > Security > Passwords.
Secure Your Portal
Ensure that you are using a signed SSL certificate (https) for your Portal, so all traffic between the web server and the user is encrypted.
Benefits of using https for your Portal include:
- protecting the integrity of your website
- protecting the privacy and security of your users
For more information about SSL certificates, click here.