Secondary schools fail off-site backup test

Pupil and teacher files may not be safe

Many secondary schools are failing to heed rules on information storage set out by government agency Becta by not keeping off site backups of their data.

A survey of 108 secondary school network managers was published this week by RM Data Solutions, a company which specialises in providing consultancy and IT services to the education sector.

It found that the average secondary school will see demand for data storage capacity increase by 75 per cent, from 2TB currently to 3.5TB by 2012, putting considerable strain on storage resources.

And 33 per cent of those questioned in the survey said they have yet to implement written backup and disaster recovery strategies, despite Becta rules insisting that data be replicated off site.

“The focus of this research was on the storage side, but what came out was that schools are mixed when it comes to backup,” said Jon Gould, product manager for hardware solutions at RM Education.

“Becta has guidelines on backup that have not been refreshed for around five years, and it is generally thought that they need updating. Lots of schools do not know about those guidelines - which insist that a copy of the data is taken off site in case the school burns down - and are not abiding by them.”

Becta (formerly the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) promotes the use of IT in learning.

Many of its backup guidelines are exactly that, but they also insist that " institutions shall have a backup strategy that includes details of what is backed up, the frequency of backup, storage of backup media (on and off site) and recovery procedures the personal responsible for backing up data." They should also "implement the Framework for ICT Technical Support Operations Management (FITS OM)."

“Off-site backup is specifically mentioned as something that schools must do, whereas the rest are just guidelines,” said Gould.

“Schools are making a valiant attempt at it ... student records should have a much higher level of control and requirement for disaster recovery as the information is highly sensitive, is mission-critical to the work of the education institution and needs to persist and be immediately available over a longer period of time.” said Nicole Engelbert, practice leader for technology industries at research company Ovum.

When asked about the frequency of network backups, 36 per cent of those polled by RM Data Solutions said they back up every day, 56 per cent every weekday and seven per cent every week. Becta recommends that school data is backed up once a day, and database transactions twice a day.

Many service providers offer hosted off-site backup facilities for secondary schools, including RedStor which manages a remote backup for secondary schools (RBUSS) service for Devon’s Schools Management Information Systems (ScoMIS) unit.

ScoMIS provides ICT services to around 376 schools in the county, and was keen to offload data backups of curriculum and administrative data within those schools to a third party that could ensure compliance with the Becta framework.

“In partnership with RedStor, we have been able to offer schools a reliable service that takes responsibility and worry out of ensuring that data is secure, and quickly rebuilds file server configurations and restores data in the event of a disaster,” said ScoMIS technical support manager Steve Selway in a statement.

Engelbert says outsourcing data storage and security to third-party providers makes sense for many educational institutions, not least because of cost issues that may prevent them from investing in the right technology and services, and problems with hiring and retaining IT staff with the right technical expertise. Plus, established vendors are able to provide a higher-level of service at a lower cost than if institutions tried to take it on themselves.

“Storage and data security is the business of these vendors and thus they have developed expertise in these areas at a level that educators could never reasonably replicate,” she said. “Moreover, outsourcing these tasks allows education institutions to focus their energies and resources on what they do best - teaching and learning.”

Becta was unavailable for comment. A pocket guide to the FITS OM is available here: http://foi.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=25960 &CFID=6146536& CFTOKEN=48cc2ac3c1da8976-2B4D348B-FDCF-7AE1-5972971E9A3970BB

Student and teacher files, databases, curriculum software and increasingly multimedia audio and video files used in new learning techniques will drive data storage expansion in schools in the coming years.

“The worrying thing is the rate of data storage growth, because many schools do not have the infrastructure to deal with it, while IT budgets are often constrained” said Gould.

“Educational institutions will have a unique challenge with managing the coming surge in demand for and uptake of lecture-capture solutions, for example,” said Engelbert. “While listening to the audio portion of your class on your iPod Nano is nice, watching it in full video on your iPhone is even better. Storing all of this rich content will undoubtedly be a challenge to those who are committed to doing it themselves.”

Implementation of virtual learning environments (VLE), essentially portals to online educational content for pupils, teachers and parents, may worsen those data security risks though the impact on data storage capacity is harder to predict.