A No-Compromise Integrated Solution For K-12 Schools

Zscaler and Saasyan have partnered, offering K-12 schools a no-compromise integrated solution leveraging best-in-class cyber security and student safety and wellbeing.

The Challenge For K-12 Schools

With online learning, both in and out of the classroom and with school-issued devices being the new normal for students in K-12, there is a new battleground in managing cyber security, ensuring access to appropriate content and safeguarding students from cyberbullying, self-harm and threats of violence.

With the adoption of collaboration tools such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 for chat and email as an essential part of the learning experience, keeping track of a student's online activities has become exponentially more complex.

Traditional approaches to addressing this problem require schools to make compromises between best-in-class cyber security products, K-12 centric features and student safety solutions. All of which creates additional work and overhead for IT support classroom teachers and wellbeing staff.

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange and Saasyan Assure

The Zero Trust Exchange provide secure communications for users, workloads, and devices, based on identity and location, with consistent security policies over any network, across any location. The Zero Trust Exchange is an integrated platform of services, delivered from the cloud, that provide secure user-to-app, app-to-app and machine-machine communication over any network or device.

Saasyan Assure integrates with the Zero Trust Exchange to provide schools a safe environment for their students on the internet.

Saasyan Assure is an AI-powered student safety & wellbeing solution enabling schools to detect and intervene against student cyberbullying, self-harm, suicide & threats of violence and terror.

Saasyan applies advanced analytics and AI to monitor, alert and report across all student digital activities, including in chat, email, search, websites, social posts and videos.

Our cloud-based software-as-a-service solution integrates and leverages data and technologies already deployed by schools such as identity management systems, next-generation firewalls and productivity platforms including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. It then applies multiple levels of intelligence including a crowd-sourced words and phrases dictionary, fuzzy logic, natural language processing and cohort analysis to determine context and identify high-risk outlier student online activities.

Saasyan’s automated alerts and on-demand reports enable wellbeing counsellors to detect and respond to high-risk student behavioural and emotional indicators early, safeguard students across all their digital interactions and deliver on their student duty of care responsibilities.

Solution Overview

Assure receives the telemetry from Zscaler via the Nanolog Streaming Service (NSS). Using this rich data set, Assure analytics is able to detect high-risk student behavioural and emotional indicators early.

Leveraging Zscaler’s APIs, Assure can create security policies to facilitate self-service classroom management and control.

Benefits For K-12 Schools

With Saasyan’s integration with Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), schools now have:

• K-12 Centric Student Safety Alerting
  
  • Using artificial intelligence and dictionary-based matching techniques to determine if trigger words and phrases are being used in search engines, video titles and in chat messages and emails using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
    
    
• Self-serve Reporting
  • Designed for ease of use by teachers, well-being professionals and other school staff.
  • The ready-to-use reports quickly and simply display the websites and applications the students are accessing and the searches they are performing.
    
    
• Classroom Management and Controls 
  • Assure enables teachers to quickly create rules that allow or deny specific web pages, web categories, or web applications for a class, a student or several specific students.
  • With these controls, teachers can create engagement by allowing uninterrupted access to required content and the ability to create focus by temporarily blocking everything else that is not part of the lesson.
  • This not only eliminates teacher and class wait times, but it also reduces the workload of IT teams.
  • Each rule can be permanent, temporary, or scheduled for a specific class.
  • Assure’s integration with leading Learning Management Systems (LMS) allows teachers to access Assures Classroom Management and controls within their LMS.
    
    
• Deep insights and alerts into chat and email in Google Workspace and Microsoft 365
  
  • The Saasyan Assure API Connector for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, allows schools to apply Assure's advanced analytics and AI features to monitor Teams Chat, Outlook Emails, Google Chat and Gmail to detect, alert, investigate and report concerning student safety and wellbeing issues.
    
    

Grab a copy of the solution brief below: