Strategies for schools to manage risk and address regulatory requirements of cybersecurity and data privacy will be the focus of a first-ever user conference in Albany on Oct. 13.
The CyMetric K-12 User Group Conference v1.0 at Albany’s Capital Region BOCES/Northeastern Regional Information Center will gather school district administrators, data protection officers and technology directors to define best practices and network with peers.
Hosted by Caetra.io, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harris Beach PLLC, a statewide law firm, the conference will include a keynote from Louise DeCandia, Chief Privacy Officer of the New York State Education Department. Ms. DeCandia will give a progress report on the state’s implementation of New York State Education Law 2-D, which established requirements for school districts in handling personally identifiable information of students and teachers.
In addition, data protection officers, technology directors and administrators from New York school districts will learn about cybersecurity insurance in the K-12 space from Brett Carruthers, Senior Vice President and Director of Risk Management for the New York Schools Insurance Reciprocal and participate in tabletop exercises focused on incident response, business continuity and disaster recovery.
CyMetric Helping School Districts with Regulatory Compliance
CyMetric is a cloud-based software solution that generates policies and prescribes controls to reveal how well security practices meet compliance requirements – and how to close the gaps. Individual school districts in New York and Pennsylvania are among those with CyMetric licenses, as well as New York Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).
Caetra recently received a Leader in Tech Award at Legalweek New York 2022, a technology-focused conference organized by ALM. CyMetric was recognized for being unique in that it integrates the provisions of specific laws and frameworks, into the software to distill regulations into compliant controls and policies that fit organizational tolerance for risk.
“Data protection and cybersecurity are growing concerns for school districts and all organizations with increasing regulation around protection of personal identification information,” said Michael Compisi, president of Caetra.ioTM. “Failing to comply can cost organizations greatly, with regulatory fines, contractual litigation and diminished reputation. We’re looking forward to gathering our customer base to share knowledge about this topic as well as ways of utilizing CyMetric to meet regulatory requirements.”
CyMetric addresses cybersecurity and data privacy risk management across numerous industries. Currently the software maps major data privacy regulations, including General Data Protection Regulation, the New York Shield Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, California Consumer Privacy Act, and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, as well as industry-standard security and privacy frameworks.
In addition to integrating the law into controls and policies, the software removes the labor intensive burden of regulation monitoring, eliminates redundancies of overlapping regulations and helps build a culture of compliance from the top down.
Harris Beach Combines Legal Knowledge with Technology
CyMetric is the flagship product of Caetra.io, a provider of governance, risk and legal compliance (GRC) software. Harris Beach PLLC, one of the nation’s top law firms according to The National Law Journal, launched Caetra in 2019 to help organizations comply with domestic and international regulations and manage risk.
Harris Beach recognized the mounting compliance challenges clients in all industries faced with the ever-changing regulations and felt combining its legal knowledge with technology could increase efficiency and reduce legal costs. The goal is software that delivers policies, controls and regulatory analysis, generated by lawyers, at a fraction of the cost of traditional compliance programs.