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This piece is authored by Michael Coffer, Heimdal’s resident sales expert for the education sector. Michael speaks to hundreds of IT administrators a year, so few people understand the challenges of this sector better than he does. Here, he explains why Heimdal is an increasingly popular choice for IT admins everywhere.
As Heimdal’s in-house sales representative for the education sector, I spend a lot of time talking to IT administrators in schools, universities, and trusts. And while every school is different, I increasingly find the same challenges coming up again and again.
Today’s IT administrators have a harder job than ever – and this is certainly true of the people I speak to. The list of tasks is only growing, but the resources you have available to complete them remain stubbornly tight.
Against this backdrop, many are realizing that the tried and tested ways of running a school’s IT environment simply can’t cut it anymore. When it comes to cybersecurity, this is particularly true. More and more, IT admins are turning to solutions like Heimdal to help them achieve better security coverage while reducing costs and admin.
In this piece, I explain why.
Why managing a school’s IT environment is harder than ever
As an IT admin, there’s a lot on your to do list.
Many of these tasks have been around for as long as the job: fixing internet issues, setting up new devices, and monitoring password policies. But when it comes to cybersecurity, there are several reasons why IT administrators are having a harder time than ever before:
Compliance
Over the last few years, the list of cybersecurity compliance requirements has only grown. As of 2023, all colleges and specialist post-16 institutions (SPIs) must comply with Cyber Essentials 3.1. From July this year, the framework will also include a new update – known as Willow.
While primary and secondary schools aren’t currently required to be Cyber Essentials compliant, many assume that it’s only a matter of time until they are. All of this means that today’s IT admins have to research and install an ever-expanding web of security products just to remain compliant.
Budget
In education, getting budget for IT investment is always going to be a challenge – particularly in the public sector. At the same time, a modern IT environment needs a wide range of cybersecurity solutions just to cover the essentials. This means cybersecurity costs continue to rise, with budgets rarely keeping in line with them.
Resources
Very few school IT teams have more than two or three full-time admins. Against that backdrop, the list of tasks and responsibilities is only growing. Too often, this can make the job feel like a game of whack-a-mole, with admins spending all their time fighting fires and lacking the space to think proactively.
Skillset
The average IT admin is a jack-of-all-trades, covering everything from DNS network security to sorting out the lighting for the school play. But generally, they’re not security experts. As security gets increasingly specialized, this makes it particularly difficult for IT admins to understand what tools they need, what vendors to consider, and where to start.
Stakes
The average school will hold personal data on hundreds of students, employees, and teachers, making its IT network a hugely attractive target for hackers. At the same time, student welfare will always be the top priority for schools, meaning protecting sensitive information is non-negotiable.
Complexity
Today, schools have vastly more technology than ever before. Now, a network could consist of desktops, laptops, iPads, printers, projectors, and much more. At the same time, cloud services, software-as-a-service apps, and virtual hosting are increasingly becoming the default setting for many.
Teachers and students now also frequently log into apps from their own smartphones and laptops. All these factors combine to create complex spaghetti-like IT networks that are uniquely difficult for a small team to manage.
Why schools switch to Heimdal
So, being an IT manager in 2025 is a particularly difficult job. Generally, the situation can be summed up like this: fewer resources, smaller budgets, ever-more-complex IT environments, and an increasingly innovative threat landscape.
Against this backdrop, many schools are now thinking much more strategically about what effective cybersecurity looks like for them. It’s no longer enough to install an antivirus and call it a day. But at the same time, few IT teams have the budget, skills, or resources to manage the ever-expanding web of overlapping security tools that schools now require. Clearly, another approach is needed.
This is why schools are now increasingly switching to Heimdal. There are several reasons for this:
All your cyber essentials under one roof
To be compliant with Cyber Essentials, you need security tools to manage (at the very least) firewalls, malware protection, patch management, secure configuration, and user access control.
Against this backdrop, many schools are now finding that their list of cybersecurity tools and subscriptions is growing unsustainably. Each new subscription only adds more costs, admin, and complexity to an already unwieldy IT environment.
Heimdal, on the other hand, offers all the tools you need to comply with Cyber Essentials under a single integrated dashboard and license. This can significantly reduce both the costs of complying with these requirements and the amount of time you spend managing the underlying tools.
Read more: 3 Benefits of Using Consolidated Platforms in Cybersecurity
Automated patch management
Let’s be honest, installing patches is a time-consuming and tedious job. But avoiding your compliance requirements simply isn’t an option. So, what’s the alternative?
Advanced cybersecurity products like Heimdal increasingly offer a range of tools to automatically install patches across hardware, software, network, and operating systems. Crucially, Heimdal also lets you configure your own customized policies to decide what patches get installed and when.
This makes it significantly quicker and easier to ensure the right patches are promptly installed. As well as simplifying compliance, it also saves precious resources for your IT team.
Read more: How To Break The Metrics Mirage in Vulnerability Management
More security per dollar
In today’s cybersecurity market, it can be particularly difficult to understand if you’re getting your money’s worth. One tool might seem like an absolute steal, until you realize that it’s only one of ten products you need just to achieve compliance. At the same time, another product may seem prohibitively expensive on the surface, until you compare it with the ten overlapping subscriptions it replaces.
To help clarify this confusion, we use a metric called ‘security per dollar. Essentially, this just refers to the amount of cybersecurity functionality you’re getting for your money – regardless of how the cybersecurity vendor has chosen to package it up.
At Heimdal, our unique approach means the ‘security per dollar in our products is higher than the vast majority of products on the market. This is because we combine low costs with the widest single package of cybersecurity protections available under a single license.
For school IT teams, this is invaluable. In fact, it remains one of the most cost-effective ways to fulfill your compliance requirements.
Fast and personalized support
As an IT admin, your worst nightmare is probably a significant incident occurring while you’re not at work. The last thing you want to do is wake up in the morning and realize that the IT network was hacked overnight. At this point, it’s too late to do anything but mop up the damage.
That’s why schools are increasingly looking to outsource support. When you do so, you gain 24/7 support and monitoring, as well as a dedicated team of experts to monitor and respond to realtime threats.
And when it comes to support, Heimdal also leads the pack. Unlike the industry’s largest players, we don’t rely on third-party organizations to deliver our support. Instead, you get 24/7 in-house support, with an average response time of 11 minutes.
All this means you can sleep easy, safe in the knowledge that when the worst happens, Heimdal’s expert will have you covered.
Read more: What Are Managed Security Services: Benefits and Solutions
Proactive and reactive tools
The Education Alliance decided that Heimdal was the perfect fit for our organization. Having multiple products within the suite meant it was scalable and easy to add additional schools onto the system.
If you’re looking for an antivirus product nowadays, it’s not just about the AV engine: It’s about the wraparound of third-party patching, updates, and isolating devices when a threat appears. For me, Heimdal ticks all those boxes.
– Matt Wadsworth, Director of IT, The Education Alliance
Today, effective cybersecurity requires a mixture of both proactive and reactive tools.
To understand why, let’s consider ransomware, one of the most dangerous cyber threats a school or organization faces. At the bare minimum, defense against these attacks requires a ransomware encryption protection (REP) tool to detect and protect against encryption as it happens. Indeed, this is a minimum requirement in Cyber Essentials.
But to successfully encrypt your files, a hacker needs to first infiltrate your environment and then accumulate enough privileges to execute the attack. Therefore, a ransomware attack invariably comes after a long string of other tactics, such as phishing, vulnerability exploits, and more. In practice, this means REP alone can only deal with the symptoms of the original breach, rather than avoiding it from happening in the first place.
Therefore, a truly effective approach requires ransomware encryption protection alongside more proactive tactics such as vulnerability management, DNS security, email protection, and more. Taken together, this creates a multi-layered defense, with security barriers at every stage of a hacker’s journey.
At Heimdal, our cybersecurity platform combines both proactive and reactive tools, including:
- Proactive: DNS security, patch management, email security, endpoint detection and response (EDR)
- Reactive: Ransomware encryption protection, next-gen antivirus
This means you get all the tools you need to create an effective layered defense in a single integrated subscription.
Read more: Stay Ahead of Cyberthreats with Proactive Threat Hunting
Transparent and predictable costs
When I talk to school IT administrators, cost is often the first thing on their minds. After all, with tight budgets and an ever-growing list of technical requirements, it’s a real challenge to make the numbers add up.
Of course, keeping costs low is hugely important here – and Heimdal certainly leads the pack in this regard (see section 3). But perhaps the more important concern is around how predictable and consistent these costs are. With so many cloud services now being priced by consumption, it’s easy to sign a contract and then realize that your costs vary wildly each month, depending on what resources have been used and when. For educational institutions, this volatility simply isn’t an option.
With Heimdal, we make things easy. While each customer has a bespoke pricing plan, all are charged specifically based on the number of endpoints being monitored across the organization. This means your costs only rise when you add new endpoints, making your costs much more stable and predictable from month to month.
Heimdal protects your school so you can sleep easy
While the challenges that school IT teams are facing are high, they’re not insurmountable. And with the right technology, it can be easier than you think to achieve compliance without blowing the budget.
At Heimdal, we’re on a mission to reduce stress and improve security for schools up and down the country. Whether it’s through low costs, comprehensive coverage, or personalized support, we give IT admins the tools you need to succeed.
We know the challenges you’re facing and we know that the budget is tight. But we’ve helped countless schools and trusts find solutions to these problems that don’t break the bank. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t do the same for you.
If you want to find out more, book a demo today or get in touch with me directly at mic@heimdalsecurity.com
