At Prestige Technology, we’re dedicated to transforming school and university IT from a costly burden into a trusted, reliable tool through our EdNet service. We do this by directly addressing the most prevalent difficulties that education sectors face. But understanding what sets EdNet apart from other IT services requires a good grasp on education IT’s biggest pain points and why they’re so important to address. This article will explore how schools and colleges are threatened by cyberattacks, how legacy infrastructure holds back modernization, and how Prestige Technology’s EdNet addresses these concerns.
How Cyberattacks Exploit Education IT’s Vulnerabilities
With a constant flow of students and faculty, layers of administration, and compliant information protection, the education field requires a widespread infrastructure to support the needs of schools and universities. That infrastructure has become more vulnerable with an increase in cyberattacks across the United States.
Schools face targeted data breaches from a multitude of sources, with ransomware being a high concern. According to Upguard, Universities are often victims of breaches looking for personal identifiable information (PII). This includes anything from financial info for students and faculty, to sensitive research, and more. Even though the U.S. saw a 9% decline in the number of ransomware attacks on universities between 2024 and 2025, the U.S. had the highest number of education-related ransomware attacks in 2025 with 130.
What makes it so easy to attack university systems is the size of their infrastructure. The majority of a college’s digital presence is made up of web-facing assets, like domains and sub-domains linking to internal resources. When someone exploits a weak point in one of these domains, they gain access to internal networks, resulting in a data breach. The reason universities have such a large domain network is mainly due to faculty staff creating additional websites to better serve different educational requirements. Since most education websites usually require submitting sensitive student data, each new internet-facing asset becomes a target for cyber-attacks.
The risks associated with a large domain network are made even worse when that network contains unmaintained sites – sites that remain connected to the internet despite no longer being required. The average number of unmaintained sites for most universities was 13, approximately 5% of the average number of domains. For the top 500 universities, approximately 3.7% of their domains were unmaintained. Left unchecked, unmaintained sites could lead to security incidents since they often use end-of-life software with exploitable vulnerabilities. In the same study, an average of 30 domains were using end-of-life PHP that had not been updated in at least two years, with 45% of all universities having at least one asset running a version of software past its end-of-life date.
Modernizing Education IT Beyond Outdated Systems
What are some ways that universities and schools can counter their outdated digital infrastructure weaknesses? Many times, system vulnerabilities arise from a lack of updated resources. Schools and colleges are often working out of an outdated IT foundation, but either can’t afford to update or are so dependent on their old system workflow that modernizing that foundation is essential to propelling schools forward into safer and more efficient operations.
A big turning point for many schools is updating to supplemental hybrid strategies. A well-planned cloud-computing strategy helps balance on-premise workloads by distributing them across the cloud. Workloads requiring low-latency or higher security monitoring can still be conducted on site, while others that can benefit from scalability and flexibility could be moved to the cloud. This strategic placement allows institutions to optimize their resources while managing their overall costs.
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) can also assist in this area. Widely considered the next step in IT infrastructure, it combines the scalability of cloud-compute strategies with the simplicity of on-site solutions by virtualizing computing, network and storage solutions and combining them under a single, software-defined interface. HCI work as a single large cluster composed of smaller server and storage “nodes” that can be scaled and managed on demand. This model can help manage fluctuating demands without overprovisioning or underutilizing their resources. Colleges and universities can rapidly scale their operations up or down based on current needs, avoiding the limitations of fixed capacity systems.
But progress has to come with safeguards. With security being a top concern for colleges and schools, institutions can’t rush upgrading their technology at the cost of compromising their ability to protect their data and meet local and federal compliance requirements. Advanced cybersecurity measures such as zero-trust architectures, data encryption and continuous monitoring is essential. A hybrid cloud approach mixed with HCI can ensure that data is secure regardless of location through encryption and access controls and adhering to regulatory requirements.
How EdNet Addresses Education IT’s Biggest Pain Points
Prestige Technology’s EdNet service is custom built to meet the needs of education IT by directly addressing the cybersecurity and modernization concerns of education sectors. Keeping student, faculty, and institutional data safe is the key focus of our advanced endpoint security, zero-trust frameworks, and AI- powered threat detection. Our fully managed HCI ensures flexible, scalable access and operational capacity that’s easy to manage at any level. We also maintain our service at a budget-friendly approach, letting schools and universities eliminate their IT headaches and unpredictable costs with a fixed monthly service model through a single vendor.
Education infrastructure is already a complicated field. Cybersecurity fears, setbacks from outdated and unoptimized systems, and budgetary stress shouldn’t be adding onto to those complications. EdNet keeps things simple, clear, and straightforward, allowing schools and colleges to flourish without IT difficulties holding them back.