The first thing you need to do is to make sure that any access to your network, particularly areas of it that need to be protected, are behind passwords. Passwords should be chosen as a mixture of numbers and letters with upper and lower case elements to make them harder to guess, and they should be changed regularly – once a month or so. Staff may grumble, but it’s worth the extra effort for the protection that they can provide. 

 

You should require that any device brought into the school by staff is registered. Take down the details of the device type, the carrier, the MAC address, and the user to create a full profile. This will allow you to identify devices which are breaking policies, and causing issues with the network. You can ban users with their MAC addresses. This will also help narrow it down to staff or pupils when looking at user logins.

You don’t have to support all platforms on your network, and you can in fact use this to limit access. For example, a Christmas bonus of an iPad for all your staff would allow you to implement iOS access only. Any other operating system – Windows, Chrome, Blackberry, Android, and so on – would not be allowed access. This limits the number of people who would be able to get online.

Have your IT teachers or backend staff use a training day to make sure that everyone is up to date on security measures. Cover the most basic elements as well as going into more advanced ideas. This will help to ensure that no staff member unwittingly leaks data or causes a network breach.

In order to give access to files without access to the network, use an isolated cloud system such as DropBox or Google Docs. These are protected by logins themselves, and if they are hacked, the rest of the network and the data on it are still safe. They also allow rapid and easy file sharing.

Decide on which applications will and won’t be supported by the school and enforce these policies strictly. You don’t want to have a situation where teachers are complaining about not being able to access games at lunch time – these apps aren’t necessary to their jobs. Concentrate on educational tools and make it clear that you will not be supporting others.

You can make things safer for the students by also limiting website access. Adult sites should be blocked, as well as anything that would be blocked on the school’s computers. This prevents unauthorised access on a mobile phone or tablet of content that students should not be exposed to. Be thorough as kids, especially teens, can be very inventive and often figure out ways to get around blocks!

With these policies in place, you should have a better chance of protecting your network whilst also allowing BYOD to be in effect. You can control what happens on the network and which devices connect to it, as well as isolating and blocking problem devices from regaining access.