Background

The State of Texas signed Senate Bill 820 into law on June 10, 2019. Senate Bill 820, or SB820 mandates a minimum set of cybersecurity requirements for Texas school districts. SB820 amends the current Education Code, adding language about the cybersecurity requirements to TEC Section 11.175.

The full text can be found on the State of Texas website.

The requirements take effect September 1, 2019, just as the new school year and fiscal year start.

As part of this law, school districts are required to put into place policies that do not conflict with the already established Texas Cybersecurity Framework that Texas agencies are required to follow

Texas Cybersecurity Framework

The Texas Cybersecurity Framework is the framework defined in Senate Bill 820 as the baseline requirements for organizations to assess themselves against. The Texas Cybersecurity Framework segments 46 control objectives across 5 families, based on their roll in a lifecycle.

• Identify assets and data throughout the organization.
• Protect identified assets, data, and systems based on risk.
• Detect control gaps, vulnerabilities, and security events.
• Respond quickly and effectively to security events to minimize damage.
• Recover systems in the event of an incident or disaster.

The goal of the Texas Cybersecurity Framework is to apply a standardized maturity scoring system, on a scale of 0-5 (none - optimal), to allow organizations to baseline themselves and show marked improvement over time as the organization implements processes and procedures outlined in the framework.

Even though organizations have a choice on which framework to implement, the State will be requiring organizations to submit their maturity rankings against the 46 objectives defined in the Texas Cybersecurity Framework.

More information abouit the Texas Cybersecurity Framework can be found on the Texas Department of Information Resources (TX-DIR) website.

Our Services

The Senate Bill 820 requirements were crafted based on Texas Administrative Code, Chapter 202 (TAC202), and the Texas Cybersecurity Framework, a cybersecurity framework applied to all Texas agencies and state institutions of higher education.

Our experience with TAC202 enables us to provide our deep understanding of the Texas Cybersecurity Framework to your team to ensure compliance and protection of student and employee data in your district.

We have designed our Senate Bill 820 process to be cost effective to ensure all school districts have an opportunity to implement industry standard cybersecurity practices, as defined in the Texas Cybersecurity Framework.

Our package contains:

Scinary Centurion MDR Internal Assessment & Penetration Testing Monthly External Scans & Penetration Testing Policy & Procedure Development HB3834 Certified Training