How Secure is your VLE? With Martin Bean, CBE
How can you ensure your VLE is secure? In this video, Martin Bean CBE shares his advice...
One of the things I had the great pleasure of doing when I was vice chancellor at RMIT University in Australia was co chairing with a representative of government the task force for universities as it related to foreign interference in our institutions in Australia. And that really required us to think deeply about how do we keep our great universities and their intellectual property and their freedom safe and secure in an ever increasingly hostile global environment. Because whether we like it or not, educational institutions are prime targets for sophisticated cyber threats. We are big, unwieldy, complicated institutions that house some of the world's greatest innovation, but also we represent the interests of some very important human beings, whether they are our staff, our students, our stakeholders. So modern VLEs require up to date security measures to protect sensitive data. It's as simple as that.
And I know for many of us, because I'm I'm working in in many of your IT departments around the world, it feels safer when it's in our data centers. It's on our premises. It's our people that are walking in to take care of it. We'll never be able to invest the time, the people, the know how, the innovation that the major cloud based hosters in the world can to keep us safe and secure. SaaS based, cloud based VLEs offer regular updates, security monitoring, and risk management capabilities that we, on our own, will never be able to invest enough in to keep pace. Recent events that we've noticed around major technological infrastructure outages that brought in some cases parts of the world to their knees because of inappropriate patches and fixes really brought home again to us quite viscerally what it's like when our systems just don't work or when we no longer have the keys to our systems that we need to operate. And so cybersecurity is part of your evaluation process for a VLE, has to be one of the top three things that you look at.
And I know for many of us, because I'm I'm working in in many of your IT departments around the world, it feels safer when it's in our data centers. It's on our premises. It's our people that are walking in to take care of it. We'll never be able to invest the time, the people, the know how, the innovation that the major cloud based hosters in the world can to keep us safe and secure. SaaS based, cloud based VLEs offer regular updates, security monitoring, and risk management capabilities that we, on our own, will never be able to invest enough in to keep pace. Recent events that we've noticed around major technological infrastructure outages that brought in some cases parts of the world to their knees because of inappropriate patches and fixes really brought home again to us quite viscerally what it's like when our systems just don't work or when we no longer have the keys to our systems that we need to operate. And so cybersecurity is part of your evaluation process for a VLE, has to be one of the top three things that you look at.
“I’ve led two major universities through the transition from on-premise systems to the cloud. Let me tell you, no matter how skilled your team is in monitoring security, the pace of evolving threats will outstrip you. And as solid as your on-premise data centre provider might be, it simply can’t match the security capabilities of leading cloud-based hosting.”
- Martin Bean CBE former Vice Chancellor at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, a Canvas VLE Customer