Maximizing Educational Technology with Deep Freeze

There are few sectors more important than education. Teaching children, young people and adults learning new skills is a critical service to provide as an organization or institution. Today, the best way to do that often involves various technological platforms, devices, solutions and services.

These technological innovations make it easier than ever to educate, collaborate and disseminate information. However, they can also cause headaches. They can be tricky to learn how to use properly, they can pose security vulnerabilities and they sometimes fail in unexpected ways.

Faronics can help. Deep Freeze is a solution that can take educational departments to the next level. Learn how you can make educational technology safer, more reliable and easier to use.

Strengthening Education

Education can involve a lot of important and sensitive information. A technological system may contain curricula, lesson plans, proprietary information, personal data and more. This can make education institutions prime targets for hackers. Bad faith actors may hack into your system to hold information for ransom. Others may want to attack your systems just to cause chaos.

Deep Freeze can ensure these criminals don’t get to have their fun. This is a solution that makes workstation configurations indestructible. Deep Freeze can guarantee 100% workstation recovery upon restart. Whatever someone or something does to your system, you can simply reboot it to a state before the changes occurred. 

Deep Freeze also provides password protection and complete security. This solution can protect multiple hard drives and partitions. It’s important to remember that human error can be just as damaging — and is often more prevalent — than deliberate maliciousness. That’s why we designed Deep Freeze to prevent configuration drift and accidental system misconfiguration. 

There are other benefits to the solution, too. For example, it helps maintain software compliance across all workstations. With Deep Freeze, users can solve their own problems with the simple push of the restore button. This saves time and resources by letting IT departments focus on more pressing issues. Given that schools can allocate as much as a fifth of their entire budget to IT maintenance and support, Deep Freeze can be a real cost saver. It can also help with efficiency by allowing the educational staff to get back to teaching. 

Boost Computer Lab Efficacy

Deep Freeze can prove a greatly beneficial addition to any computer laboratory. These labs can be a chaotic place, especially for schools teaching young children. The chances of a student accidentally downloading malware or inadvertently messing with system settings are pretty high.

With patented Reboot to Restore technology, Deep Freeze can make it so this isn’t a big concern. Notice some weird or damaging modification to the system after a bunch of kids were monkeying about in the computer lab? You just have to reboot and restore, erasing any modifications from the session. Everything returns to its initial state — no harm, no foul.

Boost the Student Experience

Schools aren’t always known for having the best, up-to-date equipment and technology. You may have memories from your own youth of sitting in a school lab, impatiently waiting for the slowest computer you’ve ever experienced to lurch into action. This often happens because these computers are bogged down with so many programs, files and potentially damaging downloads from the many different students who have used it before.

This can be a real drag for kids and cause them to lose focus. And if the technology fails completely, teachers must create a whole new lesson plan on the spot. Deep Freeze can keep the computers in good condition, meaning the students always have a fast, functional and responsive computer on which they can learn.

How Does Deep Freeze Keep Education Institutions Safe?

Reboot to Restore enables schools and education teams to revert to states before harmful changes occurred. But this isn’t the only safety feature Deep Freeze offers. In fact, this is a solution with layered security.

This “defense-in-depth” strategy involves several measures that all serve as protective barriers for your network. Deep Freeze is only one of these layers; it’s bolstered by firewalls, antivirus software and data encryption. Here’s how they work:

• Antivirus software: With an antivirus solution, you can detect and eliminate malware.
• Cybersecurity training: Regular training can help staff recognize phishing attempts and guard against them.
• Data encryption: Encrypting data protects sensitive information, such as student data, so nobody outside the system can access it if a breach happens.
• Firewalls: These block unauthorized access to the network.

Data Privacy Regulations and Compliance

Deep Freeze is not just protective against threats like malware and unauthorized changes; it also protects against compliance issues. Deep Freeze helps educational institutions comply with data privacy regulations, such as FERPA in the U.S. and GDPR in Europe. These regulations require institutions to keep student data safe. By erasing any changes from each session, Deep Freeze ensures that no personal data remains on workstations, reducing the risk of breaches.

If you’re interested in making your educational system more secure, easier to use and more fun for pupils, please reach out to our experts today! We’ll tell you how you can get Deep Freeze for your institution.