Like any other highly regulated industry, international student recruitment is a complex business.
Traditionally, it has relied on the specialist knowledge and dedication of people. People who are prepared to put in hard admin yards, to tirelessly follow up with students and partners across time zones, moving applicants slowly but surely through internal processes, until every CAS box is painstakingly ticked, visa challenge is surmounted, and (fingers crossed) deadline is met.
These highly manual recruitment processes are not only ripe for the huge business efficiencies brought by smarter tech, but they also put students’ data—financial documents, passport scans, and other information—at risk, as they bounce around email servers, before more often than not, ending up in a spreadsheet somewhere.
Of course, long gone are the days when staff would have printouts of student documents (like passports) floating around the office, but current digital systems in HE still have a long way to go in terms of building resilience when it comes to data protection.
The added burden of UKVI regulatory obligations mean that documents need to be stored by a university for up to six years after a visa case is closed, in case they are audited. That really is a mountain of data that needs to be properly protected and stored.
Bracing for impact
With The National Cyber Security Centre and Jisc issuing stark warnings about a rising tide of ransomware attacks against the UK education sector in the last 12 months, now is the time to reflect on the processes that could expose HEIs and their students to unacceptable levels of risk.
International recruitment and compliance systems are a good place to start, with students in certain regions needing to provide over 15 documents containing sensitive data to the sponsoring university as part of the visa application process.
Even when working internally, competing priorities between recruitment and compliance teams mean that they would benefit from smarter tools to work effectively, securely and in alignment when processing student documents, in order to ensure the best possible student experience.
Our secure, cloud-based solution
At Enroly, our cloud-first platform automates this work, and we put the data security of our client universities and their stakeholders at the heart of how we build our system.
Underpinned by best-in-class AWS security infrastructure, you can rest easy knowing that all data is encrypted at rest, in transit and in the database, and that we leverage all the security benefits of the cloud.
It is one of the many reasons our IT partners value our products. Michael Cooper, Senior Technical Security Engineer at the University of Greenwich, says, ‘I can honestly say it’s a pleasure to review an information security checklist for a system that has clearly been designed with security in mind from the ground up rather than as an afterthought, it really does show.’
The system is always UKVI audit ready, with built-in Appendix D document retention and deletion in line with compliance and GDPR obligations. We are also endorsed by Jisc.ac.uk and completed a Jisc coordinated penetration test.
So why not plug us in? It’s a complex business made simple.
Are you a university looking to find out more? Book a slot in my calendar.
