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Getting your college website hosted in the cloud

By Bruce Hopkins Leave a Comment

Since the news media is on fire the past few days because of the SolarWinds malware that has made its way into multiple government agencies and even Microsoft. Many techs are now thinking about the security of self-hosted platforms and would it just be better to move the websites to the cloud.

According to news sources, the attack may be Russian in nature. It could just be some Ukrainian or Slavic guys who got bored bouncing through the Russian IPs.

Regardless this attack was very well organized, and they could access a lot even the nuclear secrets data. As well as a lot of government agencies.

This likely has a lot of community college techs wondering if they may be a target too. Solarwinds does push sales into the colleges, and the company does have some handy network monitoring tools. That is likely the reason they were able to access so much by exploiting the Solarwinds vulnerability.

So now that this is exposed, how can networks protect themselves. Have good firewalls, both hardware and software defenses on your network. It is the number one thing you need, but moving your website offsite into the cloud would add another layer to your defenses.

You may be asking how can moving a website to another external host help with security of my website? There is so much more there that I don’t control.

If your website is hosted internally on the same network as your domain or student information system, then all an attacker needs to do is to do a DNS query and, with just a little scanning, figure out every public-facing host on your network that they may look for weaknesses in the config or OS.

But if your website were hosted on somename.aws.amazon.com or Azure, then that query would not produce your network range. This is really the only reason you need to make a case for moving the site to an external network. This would not stop the Russian KGB from figuring you out, but I doubt they care too much about your individual students, but some spammer in Ukraine might, and they may not be as knowledgable when you get out of the script kiddie tools.

The other advantage of moving a website to the cloud include Stability, infinite scalability. No matter how many students the admissions folks bring into the website, it will grow as needed. And setting up the correct scaling descaling can really save college’s money in the long run instead of maintaining their own virtual instance. You don’t have to worry about hardware or OS issues; you worry about your code.

While it may require some refactoring and you may need to set up a point to point VPN between your AWS network and the college network for some data transfer, the benefits will be worth the effort.

December 18, 2020

Personal Finance versus Business Courses

By Bruce Hopkins Leave a Comment

Best IPad Apps for College Students

Almost all college majors take some sort of business finance, business management or accounting courses. So why is it that so many college students wind in debt to their eyeballs and do a generally poor job of managing their own finances where 62% of … [Continue reading] about Personal Finance versus Business Courses

August 23, 2020

College’s and Domain Names

By Bruce Hopkins Leave a Comment

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There was a time when two-year community colleges were not eligible to obtain an EDU domain name. I was working at a fairly large technical college at the time and it hurt our marketing efforts. There were a lot of regents schools at the time and I … [Continue reading] about College’s and Domain Names

August 19, 2020

How to get College Applicants to Complete the Process

By Bruce Hopkins Leave a Comment

Professional Social Media

Getting students to complete the admissions process can sometimes be very difficult. It's usually not hard to get a potential student to complete an application. Still, getting them to complete all the other tasks, such as submitting all … [Continue reading] about How to get College Applicants to Complete the Process

August 18, 2020

Utilizing Microservices in Education

By Bruce Hopkins Leave a Comment

As someone who has spent a lot of years watching different trends in system design, I find the current trend of micro services very interesting. Many years ago I was setting in a system design class with an adjunct professor making me way through … [Continue reading] about Utilizing Microservices in Education

August 16, 2020

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