If the future of South Africa is shaped by the opportunities we create for young people today, then the promise of a digital education and the opportunities it provides is one of our most important and urgent endeavours. So too is the digital security of Gen Alpha’s classrooms.
By Doros Hadjizenonos, regional director: southern Africa at Fortinet
A connected classroom can give a learner – even in the most rural of South African communities – access to the same learning materials, research tools and digital skills as a learner in a well-resourced urban school, which is reason enough to give the project the serious attention it deserves.
According to the Department of Basic Education (DBE), more than 545 000 learner ICT devices and over 30 000 teacher ICT devices were procured between the 2022/23 and 2023/24 financial years, while 10 588 classrooms were equipped with ICT resources for teaching and learning. More than 535 000 learners and nearly 60 000 teachers are now digitally connected for learning and content delivery purposes. Of course, as meaningful steps are being taken in the right direction, digital security must keep pace.
The internet is now part and parcel of how Gen Alpha learns and understands the world. The obvious caveat is that giving children access to digital tools without the right protections in place introduces risk, and digital classrooms are no different. UNESCO has also warned that while digital technologies and AI can expand access to education, they raise serious questions around privacy, safety, ethics, governance and equity, which means conversations about school connectivity are also very much about safety.
From connected schools to protected schools
A school-by-school approach to cybersecurity may work when a country is connecting a small number of institutions. It becomes far harder when the ambition is to support thousands of schools, many of which have limited on-site technical resources. Well-rounded education guidance recognises that as schools adapt their IT infrastructure to support digital transformation, they also need a security transformation to protect against a constantly expanding attack surface.
The idea of a ‘Sovereign Campus’ model is especially relevant because instead of expecting each school to manage its own security, filtering, access rules and threat response in isolation, the education system can be protected through a centrally managed, sovereign security architecture. This approach allows safety policies, web filtering, malware protection, access control, data protection, and visibility to be managed consistently across thousands of distributed endpoints.
A learner should be protected whether they are using a school computer lab, a tablet in a classroom, or a managed device at home, just like a teacher should be able to access approved platforms without unnecessary friction, while administrators should have visibility into risks without needing every school to operate like a fully resourced IT department.
Any security solution should be able to share threat intelligence, provide visibility across a borderless network and deliver faster, automated responses to threats. Within the digital education environment, the challenge is rarely one device, one school, or one application, but the combined risk that comes with hundreds of users, devices in dispersed locations, and various learning platforms.
Safety and sovereignty
Digital education is poised to (and should) be an equaliser for youth empowerment on a national scale. Protecting against the cyber threats this interconnected new paradigm does enable should therefore not be a hidden source of inequality. A learner’s level of protection should not depend on the resources of their particular school or whether an on-site IT technician is available on a specific day.
Our country still has to grapple with a more general digital divide that affects children from fully participating in online learning. The Department of Basic Education noted that ICASA, in support of the SA Connect Policy, committed to allocating 16 139 public schools to five licensees as a social obligation, with 570 libraries also allocated for connectivity. The scale of this kind of project is significant, and it points to the need for a security model that can operate at national scale to help ensure the same baseline protections apply everywhere. A future is being built for our young people with renewed ambition and commitment. Protecting this grand project is equally essential.
A national education system handles sensitive information including student records, teacher credentials, school administration data, device activity and digital learning behaviour which all need to be protected. When this data is spread across devices, cloud services, third-party platforms and school networks, the question of who controls it is absolutely critical.
Globally the benchmark in these environments is found in Sovereign SASE frameworks that allows organisations to maintain control over sensitive data while complying with regional data regulations. South Africa’s own regulations have already paved the way for world-class implementation of these essential protective measures, as well as the gains in optimisation it brings about.
These sovereign-focused solutions also support secure access for users, applications and data regardless of location, while maintaining granular control over data access and movement. We are building a brand new digital future, and these foundational cybersecurity solutions will help parents, teachers and learners to know that digital education is being delivered in a way that respects privacy, safety and accountability.
Building the foundation for digital learning
South Africa’s education system does not need to choose between connectivity and protection. The two should be designed together. A secure digital education model should include centralised visibility, age-appropriate content filtering, malware protection, identity and access controls, secure networking, automated threat response and clear governance over learner data. Importantly, it should also be simple enough for schools to use, even when they do not have large IT teams on site – as is the case for the vast majority.
School connectivity should be thought of as critical national digital infrastructure. In the same way that roads, electricity and water systems are built with safety standards because they serve the public, digital learning networks should be treated with the same seriousness. The next generation will grow up in a world where digital skills will determine – to an even greater extent – access to work and economic participation. The classroom is where that future begins. We might not associate schools in a small rural town with cybercrime – so let’s keep it that way.