Industry: K-12
Strengthen your K-12 schools' cybersecurity and ensure secure access to sensitive academic and administrative data with a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution like KeeperPAM®.
Of K-12 schools reported a ransomware attack in 2024
Records were affected by ransomware attacks in the education sector worldwide in 2024
Of K-12 schools reported experiencing cyber incidents
With phishing and social engineering among the most common attack vectors in education, a single compromised teacher or IT administrator account can give cybercriminals access to privileged systems. The risk is even greater when staff reuse passwords or share admin accounts, which can make it harder to trace and contain a breach.
Historically, K-12 schools have relied on single-factor logins and weak password policies. Without stronger protections, such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), privileged accounts become easy targets for cybercriminals, which increases the risk of lateral movement across systems if an attack occurs.
Schools often struggle to enforce the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). Over time, this can lead to teachers and staff accumulating permissions or using accounts with broad admin rights that are not needed for their role. These over-privileged users expand the attack surface and increase the risk that K-12 schools will suffer a large-scale data breach.
IT environments in K-12 are often decentralized, which leads to inconsistent security practices and limited visibility. Without proper oversight, suspicious activity can go unnoticed. An absence of centralized oversight also means schools might not catch unauthorized access until after data is lost or damage has already been done.
Education privacy laws like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) require schools to know who accesses protected records. However, many districts struggle to meet these oversight obligations due to a lack of proper PAM processes. Insufficient auditing and review not only create blind spots, but can also lead to compliance violations and regulatory fines.
K-12 schools frequently rely on outside vendors and service providers. While schools should ensure vendors have only the privileges they need, and only when they need them, this is often not the case. Many districts lack strict controls and oversight for managing vendor access, which increases the risk of unauthorized access and breaches.
KeeperPAM enables IT administrators to enforce least-privilege access by configuring granular, Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC), allowing staff to access only the systems and data necessary for their role. Just-in-Time (JIT) access further reduces risk by granting temporary access for specific tasks, which is automatically revoked once the session ends. When combined with automated password rotation and secrets management, KeeperPAM helps ensure privileged accounts are protected from misuse, misconfiguration and credential theft.
Legacy PAM solutions are prohibitively expensive, difficult to deploy, hard to use and do not monitor and protect every user, on every device, from every location. KeeperPAM is human-centric, cost-effective, easy to use, quick to provision and doesn't require dedicated IT staff to manage.
Keeper Endpoint Privilege Manager delivers Privileged Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM) capabilities to help schools manage elevated privileges on school devices. IT teams can define which applications or system actions users are allowed to run, such as installing software or changing configurations, without granting full admin rights. These privileges can be time-limited, tied to approval workflows and fully audited.
KeeperPAM helps K-12 schools enforce strong, consistent authentication for all privileged access. It integrates with Identity Providers (IdPs) like Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID to support Single Sign-On (SSO) to help streamline the login experiences for staff. To further protect access, KeeperPAM adds MFA to every system, even those that don't support MFA natively, to ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive resources.
Through the Keeper Admin Console, IT teams can monitor privileged access across all schools and departments from a single location, regardless of where the infrastructure is located. Whether resources are hosted in AWS, Azure or on-prem servers, KeeperPAM deploys through lightweight gateways that don't require firewall changes or inbound network access. This agentless, cloud-native architecture simplifies deployment across distributed environments and provides real-time auditing, session recording and integration with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms for full oversight and accountability.
KeeperPAM supports compliance by maintaining detailed access logs, session recordings and audit trails for all privileged activity. With zero-knowledge encryption, even Keeper cannot access the content of these logs or user vaults. Schools can also enforce policies that restrict copying, downloading and printing of sensitive data, which not only prevents data exfiltration but also proves FERPA alignment during audits.
KeeperPAM enables IT administrators to provision precise, time-bound access to third-party vendors without exposing credentials or VPN access. Vendors authenticate through the Keeper Vault, where they receive secure, temporary access to only the systems they need and nothing more. All sessions are recorded and monitored in real time, and permissions can be revoked instantly. This eliminates the need to share passwords or manage one-off firewall rules, providing districts with a secure and scalable way to support external vendors while maintaining complete control over privileged access.
"We're able to go in and audit the security of the accounts and the password security, and make sure that everybody has their multi-factor set up. There's a lot of nice features in Keeper that give us the ability to lock everything down."
Whinston Antion
Assistant Director of Identity & Access Management, West Virginia University
"We set expectations with users that they'd have a secure and very easy way to share passwords; in other words, a simple solution that didn't get in their way but was very effective. That's what Keeper delivers."
Josh Zojonc
Lead Infrastructure Engineer, Oregon State University
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