The School Board will take up the request to buy the new equipment at its meeting at 5 p.m. Thursday at the School Board Office, 1050 S. Foster Drive. The board is not planning to take a final vote until its Dec. 12 regular meeting.
While East Baton Rouge Parish schools have not as yet reported falling victim to a cyberattack, several government offices in Louisiana, including a handful of Louisiana school districts, have. The latest was a ransomware attack discovered on the morning of Nov. 18 that prompted the state to shut down its servers at an array of state agencies.
The proposal is to buy the new storage equipment from CMA Technology Solutions of Baton Rouge.
In a Nov. 22 memo, Chief Technology Officer Richard Ellis said the purchase will allow the school system “to update the district’s current backup systems for all mission critical data systems such as finance, human resources, directory services, and also other data.” The new equipment would also offer the “latest in reporting tools” to detect cyberattacks, Ellis wrote.
Ellis’s department plans to pull from its own budget to pay for the purchase.
In backup material for the board, Ellis provided a price quote that CMA gave to the state of Louisiana. CMA is a vendor for a state contract to supply it with what’s known as an “integrated data protection appliance” that is manufactured by Dell EMC. The appliance stores data locally as well as offsite, separating the two via what’s known as “air gap” security. The company also promises quick data recovery if there is an attack.
The East Baton Rouge Parish school is Louisiana’s second largest public school district, with about 41,600 students. It has more than 5,200 full-time employees and more than 3,000 teachers.
©2019 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
