Securing Higher Education's Digital Future with HECVAT
Higher education faces unprecedented cybersecurity challenges, with hundreds of attacks occurring each year. These attacks, when successful, often lead to significant exposure of sensitive personally identifiable information (PII), financial losses through disaster mitigation and system restoration efforts, and damage to the institution’s overall reputation and standing in the community.
The MOVEit Breach is one notorious example of how cybercriminals can exploit IT vulnerabilities in education institution systems. This breach is estimated to have affected close to 900 U.S. institutions and highlights the critical need for education institutions to deploy robust security solutions as part of their IT infrastructure.
HECVAT Framework
The Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) is a standardized framework of questionnaires used to evaluate the security and privacy capabilities of third-party and cloud service providers in the education sector. Originally developed in 2016 as a collaborative project among university IT professionals from institutions like Baylor, Indiana, and Humboldt State, HECVAT has evolved from a single questionnaire into a comprehensive set of assessment tools that includes Full, Lite, On-Premises, and Triage versions.
Today, HECVAT is widely adopted across U.S. universities to streamline procurement processes and standardize vendor risk assessment. The framework is maintained by various working groups including the Educause IT Accessibility Community Group (with volunteers from Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford) and the HECVAT Tooling Group (representing institutions like Carnegie Mellon and Indiana University).
FileCloud answers the need for secure file sharing and data governance with HECVAT-verified security features, specifically designed for higher education environments.
The platform offers rigorous deployment models, security configurations, and administrative tools to support leading institutions nationwide in providing their students, faculty, and staff with secure digital workspaces for data storage, management, and collaboration.