Building True Resilience Against Cyber Threats and Downtime in Higher Education

Higher education runs on information: student records, research data, learning platforms, and the systems that keep campus operations moving. When those systems are disrupted, teaching, research, and everyday logistics all feel the impact immediately.

At the same time, you’re dealing with increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, sprawling IT environments, and years of shortcuts and workarounds, often with tight budgets and limited staff. Cyber resilience may already be on your roadmap, but day-to-day you’re likely still living with a patchwork of tools and best-effort processes that would be hard to trust in a major incident.

Before we talk about what effective resilience looks like in practice, it helps to understand why institutions like yours have become such attractive targets in the first place.

Universities have become prime targets

Cyber activity against universities has moved from occasional disruption to a constant, high-stakes challenge. Data from Check Point Software shows that attacks across U.S. schools and universities nearly tripled between January 2024 and April 2025. That jump isn’t surprising when you look closely at your data and environment:

• Highly sensitive personal data, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, financial aid information, and payment data, are all exactly the kinds of information attackers know they can monetize quickly.

• High-value research and intellectual property, from biomedical discoveries to engineering advancements, can be worth millions in future revenue, patents, or licensing deals.

• Broad, open access networks designed for connectivity and collaboration make higher ed a prime target. Tight budgets and aging infrastructure only exacerbate this challenge.

Unlike private-sector enterprises, you can’t simply lock everything down without undermining your mission. Students, faculty, researchers, and external collaborators all need frictionless access. The result is a campus infrastructure with countless entry points, and attackers know it.

A perfect storm of complexity and vulnerability

The modern university IT ecosystem is enormous, fragmented, and evolving faster than most teams can keep up with. What used to be a relatively contained environment has become a mix of cloud applications, legacy hardware, personal devices, and department-managed tools. Every semester brings new platforms to support, more data to protect, and higher expectations from across campus.

Most of this is managed by small teams using a mix of aging tools and manual processes. One group may be responsible for networking, endpoint management, data protection, compliance, and incident response, often while still relying on legacy backup software, spreadsheets, and even tape. Add in remote and hybrid learning, plus an ever-expanding edge, and the attack surface grows faster than your capacity to secure it.

Unpredictable costs add another layer of risk. Cloud egress and API fees can turn a single recovery event into thousands of dollars in unplanned spend. According to the Wasabi 2025 Cloud Storage Index, 76% of education institutions exceeded their cloud budget the prior year. In that environment, any major incident affects far more than infrastructure.

The real cost of downtime in higher education

When your institution suffers a ransomware attack or major system outage, it’s not just an IT problem. It’s a campus-wide disruption with real consequences:  

• Academic continuity: Classes get canceled, exams get postponed, and LMS platforms go offline. Faculty scramble for workarounds, and students lose access to assignments, grades, and course materials.

• Research progress: Experiments halt, datasets become unavailable, and lab systems go dark. For projects tied to grant timelines or clinical trials, even short delays can have serious downstream effects.

• Student trust: Students expect the same digital reliability from your institution that they get from consumer apps. Frequent outages or highly publicized cyber incidents erode confidence not just in IT, but in the institution.

• Regulatory compliance: You must protect FERPA records, research data tied to grants, and other evolving regulations. Breaches and extended downtime can trigger investigations, penalties, and lasting reputational damage.

• Budget planning: Cyber incidents can result in millions of dollars in remediation costs, legal fees, recovery expenses, and public relations impact, none of which are easy to absorb in already tight budgets.

Taken together, these impacts point to the same issue. It’s not just about stopping attacks; it’s about how well you can withstand them and recover. That’s true cyber resilience: having the right capabilities in place so teaching, research, and operations can continue even when something goes wrong. 

What cyber resilience means for higher ed IT

Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to keep operating and recover quickly when systems are disrupted by cyberattacks, failures, or other incidents. In practical terms, it shows up in the day-to-day life of a campus like this:

You always know what’s protected, and what isn’t. You have a clear view of where critical data lives across learning systems, research infrastructure, and core operations. And you can see at a glance whether it’s covered by policy-driven backups and retention.

New systems don’t slip through the cracks. When a new application rolls out for student services or a new research project spins up, it’s brought under protection automatically. You’re not relying on someone remembering to submit a ticket or add another manual job.

Incidents trigger a plan, not panic. When something does go wrong (ransomware, accidental deletion, storage failure), you have clean, immutable recovery points to fall back on. Your team follows a tested playbook instead of scrambling to piece together what was backed up where.

Recovery is fast enough to avoid major disruption. You can restore specific datasets, applications, or entire systems quickly enough that classes stay on track and research doesn’t have to start from scratch.

You’ve defined a critical operations baseline. If an agent update, new tool rollout, or other change causes unexpected outages, you’ve already identified a minimum viable set of systems and data (your “go bag”) that you can stand back up quickly to keep core operations running while you work on a fuller recovery. 

Testing doesn’t come with a financial penalty. You can run realistic recovery drills and larger restores without worrying that egress or API fees will blow up your cloud budget, so practice becomes routine instead of rare.

The campus experience stays stable, even when IT is busy. From a student or faculty perspective, services feel reliable. Behind the scenes, your team has fewer fire drills, more predictable costs, and the breathing room to work on improvements instead of living in constant reaction mode.

That’s what cyber resilience really translates to for higher education: the ability to protect the work happening on your campus and recover quickly enough that teaching, research, and operations can keep moving, no matter what happens.

How Wasabi and HYCU put resilience into practice

In our recent session, “Building True Data Resilience in Education”, we partnered with HYCU to walk through what resilience looks like for higher ed IT teams on real campuses.

HYCU focuses on the backup and recovery side: discovering your workloads, automating protection, and taking a lot of the manual job setup and agent management off your plate. Wasabi provides the storage foundation under that automation. Your backup data lands in our secure, immutable cloud storage with straightforward pricing and no egress or API fees when you need to pull data back.

Together, HYCU and Wasabi offer a path to resilience that fits campus reality today: simpler to run, easier to test, and far more predictable from a cost perspective. You can protect the systems that matter, run meaningful recovery tests, and give your team some of the breathing room it rarely gets.

Most importantly, you’re not just hoping to survive the next incident. You’re steadily putting yourself in a better, more resilient position before it arrives.