As a cybersecurity professional, you must stay abreast of the latest resources that help users protect and work with information. Such offerings are critical for the higher-education industry, which stores data related to students’ academic achievements, health records, financial aid details and more.
How Do Data Management Tools Improve the Higher-Education Industry?
Data management tools bring together information from separate distributed databases, creating a single source of truth about everything happening on campus. Authorized users can retrieve information, run reports and keep the content in a single secure location.
These purposeful data management tools allow administrators to set access parameters that only allow people to work with information related to their duties or roles — vital to ensure student and faculty records remain secure and protected from cyberattacks. As cybercrime continue to increase in the education sector — an alarming increase of 75% between 2020 and 2021 — the need for secure platforms across all aspects of university life is more prevalent than ever.
Some data management tools standardize the content, making it more user-friendly, accessible and reliable. These products keep all the relevant information in one place, streamlining cybersecurity efforts and saving people time by preventing them from needing to remember login details for several separate tools.
Who Offers the Best-Value Data Management Tools for Universities?
Cybersecurity professionals may bear the responsibility of determining who offers cost-effective data management tools that still provide exceptional security, especially as they assist their employers in the higher-education industry with handling progressively larger amounts of data while following best practices to protect it.
While going through this process, they should remember that value encompasses many aspects. Although a reasonable cost may indicate good value, so can excellent scalability because it allows users to continue using the same products over time, even as their needs grow. Similarly, people may establish that a particular option provides excellent value because it includes numerous automated features that save them time and increase. That said, there are some standout providers of data management tools that provide valuable products to clients in the higher-education industry that you should know about and consider.
1. Watermark
The professionals at Watermark have spent the last two decades developing data management solutions that give users more time to learn from higher-education information and spend less time gathering it. Watermark’s Educational Impact Suite is an integrated tool hub that shows users their data in context and helps them make informed, big-picture conclusions. It’s purpose-built for higher education, offering features and capabilities to
Whether the information relates to student retention, faculty reviews or course evaluations, the company’s data management tools can handle all that content and more, helping users extract strategic insights that increase success for students and the entire institution.
Capture information about the entire student learning journey and use rubric-based juried assessments to efficiently measure learners’ outcomes at scale. This data management tool is just as robust from the faculty side of things, allowing users to take and store educators’ information once and use it infinitely.
When it’s time to examine trends from the latest batch of student evaluations, Watermark’s solutions make it easy to convert those takeaways into the next actionable steps. The LMS integrations increase response rates, and the deep insights let people track patterns over time.
Since the company offers cloud-based tools, authorized users can access them from anywhere. That user-friendliness minimizes friction, helping people retrieve the information they want and need at any time. Cybersecurity professionals also appreciate how Watermark’s centralized system simplifies the data landscape, reducing the number of access points for malicious parties to exploit. Together, these aspects make this company a worthy possibility for those seeking the best-value data management platforms for their universities.
2. Ellucian
Ellucian offers solutions that address how many higher-education institutions have massive amounts of data but cannot use it effectively. Most people would agree that a platform offers excellent value if it allows them to do things with their internal information that were otherwise extremely challenging or impossible. Ellucian’s data management and analytics solutions assist during every stage, whether users need to consolidate files or analyze trends to cause strategic impacts.
An internal analysis can also examine an institution’s level of data maturity and how it compares to industry standards. The results may show users that they retain specific files for too long or otherwise need to consider changing their policies. The findings could also give cybersecurity professionals more leverage if they have been trying to convince organizational leaders to alter related internal practices but have yet to convince them it is time to act.
The platform can also provide customized recommendations linked to your organizational structure and strategic aims. Additionally, the powerful analytics capabilities turn higher-education institutions into data-driven organizations that can make decisions based on options that account for all stakeholders, whether students, educators or administrators.
Something that puts Ellucian among companies offering best-value data management tools is its flexible approach to pricing. These solutions work as modular offerings, so people can bundle them as a suite or choose individually priced components to create a platform that works with their budgets and other needs.
3. Informatica
Informatica empowers higher-education institutions with a cloud-based data management platform that helps users see unified views of individual students’ information and how they have progressed through their learning journeys. The associated insights allow people to improve overall experiences and personalized aspects. Since the platform compiles the content into a single, reliable source, the centralization makes cybersecurity professionals’ jobs easier by reducing the size of the potential attack surface.
This data management platform also helps users achieve and maintain regulatory compliance because its features maintain the security and privacy of sensitive student information while providing total visibility and transparency. There are also tools to automate privacy management workflows and requests, reducing the manual interventions that can cause people to make mistakes.
Since Informatica has capabilities that let people share data smoothly and safely, parties can collaborate more effectively across business entities. These solutions keep cybersecurity tight while reducing the friction that can result when people cannot quickly access the information needed to do their jobs.
If you already use other educational systems, Informatica integrates smoothly with many of them, whether the products are learning management systems or enterprise resource planning tools. Since this data management platform can sync information across multiple systems, people can rest assured that it will enhance interoperability and maintain accuracy.
Additionally, the platform’s integrated tools emphasize data security and governance by enabling anonymization, consent management and other necessities that help institutions continue to operate securely in an increasingly digital world.
4. Edify
Edify is a data management platform from EAB for the higher education industry. This product provides powerful storage capabilities to match the large and growing quantities of information users often work with daily. Since this product offers a cloud-native and secure data lake and warehouse, it helps organizations prioritize scalability and privacy while maintaining easy access for authorized parties. These cybersecurity-centered characteristics assist people in upholding best practices while seamlessly retrieving the data needed for their jobs.
Edify also comes with numerous data governance features, thanks to a transparent model built specifically for the higher-ed industry. Customizable data and metadata definitions are available out of the box to support better usability and organization. The platform’s recordkeeping features also track individual students across their whole learning experience, no matter how many times they advance to new levels or begin additional programs.
The self-service analytics capabilities enhance organizational decision-making and unlock efficiencies. Built-in support for low-or-no-code data analysis and reporting enables people to get more done without additional training, while compatibility with numerous business intelligence tools lets users create valuable data visualizations to see information in the appropriate context.
This is an enterprise-grade solution hosted on AWS. Securely storing data in the cloud enables more than 99.9% uptime, giving users the confidence needed to know Edify will support their productivity and let them get a handle on growing amounts of data.
5. Own
Own is a software-as-a-service data management tool made for the education industry. Since it is a Salesforce product, this offering has the brand recognition that can reassure people they are choosing a reputable option. This solution also has specific features that keep Salesforce data safe. Challenges related to data protection, compliance and continuity can result when educational institutions migrate to the cloud. However, Own enhances security capabilities, supporting cybersecurity professionals in meeting or exceeding organizational goals.
For example, the platform has automated backup and recovery tools for Salesforce content, helping organizations resume normal operations after accidental or malicious data loss occurs. This data management solution also streamlines compliance with data regulations for higher-education institutions. It facilitates the secure archiving of sensitive data, ensuring users can meet security and governance requirements while retaining the information’s integrity.
If an administrator plans to use data for testing and development purposes, Own has integrated masking capabilities that support innovation while upholding privacy. Additionally, customized data retention policies and in-depth reporting capabilities make audit preparations more straightforward.
Own also allows users to fill development sandboxes with accurate data, minimizing delays related to rework or other challenges. The improved efficiency makes workers more productive, ensuring they spend more time on value-added tasks instead of grappling with data-management obstacles.
6. Komprise
Poor management of a higher-education institution’s unstructured data can be a costly problem. However, Komprise offers purposeful tools that help users identify, manage and categorize the information possessed and used by these organizations.
Since this platform offers storage-agnostic data management, people can index, search through and use information regardless of its location. Additionally, Komprise always references the target storage device and retains files in the native format, ensuring the information keeps its complete context for better usability.
Komprise also gives people a global file index within minutes of deployment, showing a unified view of all an organization’s data across storage environments. Such information is valuable from a cybersecurity perspective because it reveals whether a higher-education institution may have sensitive information stored in a database with inadequate safeguards against breaches or attacks. That visibility could encourage people to make prompt and strategic decisions that improve cybersecurity preparedness for the long term.
Additionally, Komprise’s intelligent data management features let people create customized storage policies across a university, whether by department or user groups. The platform also shows access trends, facilitating better decision-making and ensuring people can quickly access information when needed.
When it’s time to move data, the built-in migration tools make it simple. They shift the information without disrupting hot data, user experiences or applications. Because this feature supports transitions to more cost-effective cloud tools, people may determine that Komprise is the best-value data management tool for universities they’ve come across that aligns with their budgets.
Choosing Data Management Tools to Increase Value in Higher Education
These feature-filled data management tools will help those working in higher education tap into numerous value streams, whether because they can work more productively, increase how data-driven insights shape student progress or save costs through better data visibility and compliance.
Cybersecurity professionals should create a list of must-have features in their desired tools and then see how closely the above solutions align with those requirements. That goal-oriented process will support people as they data management platforms that enhance their workflows and cause operational success.
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