psydii

As a lifetime spent with team Microsoft, if I found myself somewhere that would not make the strategic investment to properly run and manage a Microsoft based IT service, I’d move them to Google, there really is no alternative, other than something quite bespoke that would cost them more to (re) staff than it would to have just paid the Microsoft tax in the first place! (I’m lucky, we have A5) But as others have said, find a licensing partner who can help you navigate best value, (but have the Google migration as the plan b proposal).

Oof. Veritau nicely bouncing it back to you! I asked our DPO to do it and let us know.

They are trying to walk a line. The DPO-in-us-all know this was a data breach, but the public perception of data breaches is the massive dumping of entire data sets into the open, which this most certainly was not. They didn't leak *everyones* data, they just leaked data of one or two individuals per parent that logged on while the faulty code was running. Yes its still a data breach, and it is bad because it shows there isn't the segregation of data that we naively expected, but it isn't ICO fine inducingly awful, and they probably wont have to make and insurance claim to cover the costs of putting it right. Communicating that is challenging, and perhaps they ought to have put a caveat such as no "evidence of... mass data breach") to avoid this criticism.

Not yet. For most schools I am expecting the advice to be "...there was a breach at a national provider, for a period of xx minutes parents logging on may have seen details belonging to another child, most likely from another school. We understand that nationally the number of individuals whose data was exposed is very small. Unfortunately due to the nature of the system failure the provider has not been able to be sure whose data specially was exposed, except in cases where that individual breach was reported them. The provider has begun the process of notifying any individual whose data they know to have been leaked. At this time we do not believe any data belonging to our students, parents or staff has been exposed. We apologise etc etc."

The bit that has me concerned is this: I'm not sure if this exposes anything in Provision Map to parents, but we have no reason to suspect that the type of error that occurred for Parent accounts could not happen to staff accounts... and if it did there would be significantly more Sensitive data at risk. TES/Edukey will need to go into some detail about their back end architecture and data security models/boundaries to put my fears to rest.

It'll be people running census reports.

Fwiw judging by the lack of national news coverage this was likely just for about the period of time they suggest, probably an artefacts of the recovering the system from the outage (502 error) that occurred just before. I suspect it was a caching issue with a service not refreshing a token somewhere in their mid layer, and thus returning the wrong data. Hopefully the data is not commingled in a monolithic database/file system, and the token is the key to which store is queried for student data. (This might even make sense: within the platform as a whole student identifiers might not be unique, improving data security… (they might only be unique to the school instance) so when the mid tier cache didn’t update the school it was supposed to be accessing, it pulled the wrong student! Though if identifiers were unique across the entire platform this couldn’t have happened. Soooo…)

Yes if people clicked through they got further data.

I'm in the same camp as @Davit2005 and @dmj, so I hate the fact I just looked into it and came up with this: Use your automation to create and populate one Distribution Group per teacher called "NotTaughtByTeacher_Name" Then use this PowerShell to prevent members of these groups sending emails to the relevant staff member: Set-Mailbox -Identity Teacher_Name -RejectMessagesFromDLMembers "NotTaughByTeacher_Name" I feel dirty. On the up side, I haven't tested it so (hopefully) it might not work.

I appreciate you are not quite suggesting school techs should set up a kubernetes cluster and port their school's LoB apps to run in containers. The new platform is the cloud, where the SAAS runs on the PAS and that is what is running on kubernetes or equivalents. Meanwhile back in legacy-on-prem in the SME space... we're running Windows, AD, SIMS, various MS SQL based LoB & back-end apps, with a load of file shares and printers for good measure. A three node esxi* cluster connected to a SAN is super basic, super easy to set up and run, pretty low cost and has a large number of individuals and companies who can provide support, maintenance and consultancy who are prepared to work to school budgets. Additionally, I'm not sure one could buy three hosts with redundant power supplies that don't have the CPU grunt to run 60+ single purpose VMs sized to support a school. Thus the 1-vm-per-service is still a perfectly valid design for legacy. *other hypervisor platforms are available, and with vmware licencing going the way it has, maybe docker et al's time has come in the on-prem space. But until vendors start shipping containers rather than VMs/interactive installers for their legacy on-prem apps, VMs are going to be the preferred unit of management for school IT teams. We are in the long-tail for this stuff and vendors of the small stuff, if they haven't already got a cloud migration plan, are likely just running down the clock until all their customers swap to the cloud. The market for legacy apps used in schools re-worked to exist happily in containers is (in my rough estimation) insufficient to be profitable. This leaves an interesting situation for the younger techs here - with no vendors shipping on-prem products using the new-shiny container based stuff, are schools a dead-end for those at the beginning of their careers? Honestly maybe I just need someone to show me how its done.

This is basically a highly efficient troubleshooting technique called half-splitting. It's great for searching quickly for a thing that exists in within known boundaries. (in computer science this is equivalent to a binary search). It's been a while since I last posted one of the most useful series of articles I have ever read: "Secrets of a SuperGeek: Troubleshooting" by Mike Sullivan published on TechRepublic back in 2000. It covers the half-splitting technique in some practical detail. (The technique was also described in the appendix of at least one official Apple Professional Training book) https://web.archive.org/web/20031028065615/http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6263-1031759.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031028065615/http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6263-1031386.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031028065615/http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6263-1031758.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031011135134/http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6263-5029507.html The original articles seem to have vanished, last time I posted them here they were at new URLs, but now it seems they are completely expunged from the TechRepublic site, so I've linked to the original urls via the wayback machine.

Similar story over on Classcharts (though performance is better than figures mentioned here).

I feel seen. (though the second server room doesn't actually have any servers or a rack, but we could stand it up in the length of time it would take to order them) But seriously - a single server can have redundancy- dual power supplies a RAID and ECC Memory, with two UPS's and have it be a VM Host with your critical infra-servers all being VMs on the box. You get almost all the uptime improvements of a 60K multi-host/san based solution at a fraction of the cost. I've run a couple of schools on such a set up. In schools, generally the services we run on our servers are typically pretty simple/basic affairs so uptime and availability of each vm does actually matter (1 vm per service, so VM uptime is a reasonable proxy for service uptime, and service uptime is a critical component in service availability). The effort to run clustering or re-architect the services so they run across multiple hosts with load balancers where the relevance of the individual vm is abstracted away is really not worth the effort in a in a single site school or even a small-medium MAT. We (school users) can accept *way* more downtime (after school-core hours, overnight, school holidays) than many businesses. As long as you have *some* resiliency/redundancy at the lowest levels (power, storage, connectivity) it is relatively trivial to meet availability needs (for example the Head is not going to sanction staff being on the MIS at 2am - so that's a safe time for updates to roll out and servers reboot automatically). Of course, running equivalent services at a global scale is a completely different proposition, and we can benefit from that but we need the whole stack to the data centers to be reliable. Google, Amazon and Microsoft can handle the service infrastructure complexity from there. However things start to get sticky when you land in the middle - Classcharts, CPOMS, Applicaa and Bromcom I think being pertinent examples here. They seem barely more reliable than running equivalents in house. I've not read the DfE guidance, but I wonder how these guys stack up against the service levels we (the school/MAT teams) are expected to deliver.

Given the timing I expect there will be a big thing at BETT.

Of course things are missed. They are missed in the playground and corridors and classrooms too. But you do what you can with the resources available and each school has to make a call how it expends those resources. We've come down on one side (for now) and you've landed on the other.

You may not be using ipv6 but your computers are. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/networking/ipv6-overview

Do laptops travel between sites?

That feels like a management problem, and likely not confined to the IT space. I've been lucky, I'm allowed to tell teachers what to do*, and (generally) am well supported in doing so. Some teachers have felt the consequence of not following my direction/guidance. If your SLT accept that teachers wont do as directed, I fear there are problems here wider than IT, and altering student behavior will be equally fraught. (* lest people get the impression I have god-like powers, I *want* to tell them that they should have Teams and Outlook on their phones, and make use of the downtime features to suppress notifications outside of their preferred working hours. However this view does not have the support needed within the SLT, and so I advised that they CAN (if they wish) have Teams and Outlook on their phones, but they *SHOULD* make use of downtime features -or fully disable notifications from the apps.)

Teachers are not expected to install Teams/school email on their personal devices. If they choose to, then they should apply the working hours features built into Teams and modern smart phone operating systems.

Yeah. For now the argument that its better to see it happen where we can investigate and respond is still winning, but it would only take a couple of new SLT with a weak understanding of the culture of the school for it to flip overnight.

Whenever I have done an investigation 95% of chat on Teams is about school work, and 4% of the rest is complaints that they've got a supply teacher again (fair). Our frequent flyers are already on the safeguarding radar, and having them on Teams gives us valuable information to support them. Once a year or so somebody/a group cross a line with their behavior (typically bullying) and land themselves with a ban or an exclusion. (and this was true way back when they had email and no chat).

We have it open. We have a deep seated culture for student self monitoring etc, and modelling expected behaviors. We also have communication compliance running which catches a dozen or so chats a day some of which get flagged to the relevent SLT or into the DSL team. Between that, quarantine management, alerts through the defender dashboard, and reviewing the prevent webfilter reports, we typically spend an hour a day on data protection/safeguarding. I did look very closely into supervised chats - I was hoping that we could have it so the initiator of any chat was the supervisor (i.e. students could still start a chat), and implement an education programme based around the initiating student taking responsibility for the content of any given group/1:1 chat they initiated, but unfortunately it seems to have been designed for the more common case where only staff can initiate chat once the feature is enabled. That it could not retrospectively apply to exiting chats was also a problem. As for staff leavers... the chat would be unsupervised, but if a problem had been reported (or picked up with Communication Compliance) we could quickly re-animate the leaver's account to intervene (we could also just check leavers account for chat groups that need to be closed as part of their off-boarding experience).

MS Announcement today: "No seat minimum and expanded availability of Copilot for Microsoft 365—including small and medium-sized businesses" (including Education) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2024/01/15/expanding-copilot-for-microsoft-365-to-businesses-of-all-sizes/

The AP 315 is a fantastic wireless AP. This is a great offer for any school still lacking a reliable system. Fair warning: its' probably got another three years of life in it.

Its a local choice that needs to be informed by your data retention scheme. You have to hold some data for many years, and you are unlikely to be accessing much of this data frequently, so it might take a long time before you notice something has been deleted or corrupted. Your backup retention needs to be sufficient that you are able to recover data that you are required to keep. One solution might be that you have a set of backup repositories with appropriate retention policies (e.g. retain until 2029, retain until 2030, retain until 2031...) into which you place *just* the backups of important data aligned with how long you need to keep them on an annul basis a(e.g. financial, CP, Safeguarding, SEN etc). And then everything else can be on a much shorter policy (6 months might be fine). If you have local DC's remember that backups have a shelf life so it is questionable to be keeping them around for a year. Also it seems to be a thing that the bad-guys sometime sit inside networks for months before launching a ransomware attack. So there is merit in having some backups held for longer (though once a domain is compromised, any restored-backups are also compromised due to certain keys deep in AD being immutable). So it depends.