EdTech Breakthrough Award
Spirion won the Higher EdTech Deployment of the Year award from EdTech Breakthrough for Spirion’s success with Illinois College.
EdTech Breakthrough is a market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies and solutions in the global ed-tech market. EdTech’s goal is is to perform the deepest evaluation of the global educational technology industry each year and reward “breakthrough companies” for their innovative achievements.
A panel of experts within the EdTech industry reviewed Spirion’s application, which focused on its deployment at Illinois College. Considerations included: innovation, design, user experience, and overall technological advancements for their respective categories.
The story behind the award:
Illinois College, one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, deployed Spirion to discover and protect student and faculty data according to compliance regulations and campus rules. By providing full visibility into where all of their hard-to-find personal information lived and automating the protection options for that data, Illinois College’s small IT team was able to reduce their data footprint, and more accurately focus their limited resources and data security spend.
“With over 1,500 nominations from all over the world, Spirion’s ability to give Illinois College greater data visibility to better understand, control, and protect personal data without burdening their IT staff is a real innovation in our 2020 EdTech Breakthrough Awards program,” said James Johnson, managing director, EdTech Breakthrough.
“Spirion represents an important step towards reducing the complexity of data protection so that higher education institutions of all sizes, large or small, public or private, can take their data privacy and compliance programs to the next level,” he added.
Illinois College Case Study
As further explained in Spirion’s case study with Illinois College, their Assistant Chief Information Security Officer, Mark Brenner, has followed a staged approach to automating the college’s security and compliance programs. His initial focus concentrated on getting all data privacy processes automated through Spirion’s data discovery and persistent classification capabilities. Spirion was implemented in 2018 as a joint effort between the IT department and the Office of Financial Aid.
Once deployed, the system scanned 28 terabytes of data on servers and approximately 250 faculty, staff, and lab endpoints, performing fast and accurate searches of both structured and unstructured data. This critical first step towards data security and privacy enabled Benner and his team to automatically locate, inventory, and classify all the college’s data according to compliance regulations and campus rules.
Results
The end result was that Spirion helped Illinois College take its privacy program to the next level by putting persistent data discovery, classification, and protection at the front-end of their security and compliance programs. Spirion not only aided Illinois College’s compliance with the GLBA Safeguards Rule on a tight deadline, but it fortified their data privacy management program, giving them greater business agility to proactively meet new compliance standards in the future.
What’s next for Spirion
Spirion’s next step is the release of its Data Privacy Manager (DPM). Our latest privacy-grade solution helps you discover, classify, and remediate sensitive data wherever it lives, with 98% accuracy you can trust. DPM’s capabilities include: improved scalability and performance, a fast, modern SaaS architecture, the ability to automate complex tasks and workflows, and support for additional on-premise and cloud-based data sources. Find out more about DPM here.
