The Challenge

Finding a security solution that stops infected emails from reaching school administrators and reducing when dealing with email phishing and spoofing.

The Solution

An email security solution that supports Google and Microsoft email platforms and improves their capabilities. A solution that automatically blocks suspicious emails, preventing phishing and spoofing from entering a school’s email system.

The Value

Time saved

“Coro takes care of more than 80% of security issues. This brings down the time I spend on security daily from about two hours to around 10 minutes.”

Improved security hygiene

“Automation ensures a better security blanket than I can offer. It catches things I could have missed, it eliminates human error. I’m prone to missing things that Coro picks up on regularly.” – Kenny Shannon, IT Director at Taos Academy

Faster response time

“If Coro didn’t block suspicious emails and only notified me, it could be a while before I get the alert and respond. This time is critical for a security event to happen. So Coro cuts down on critical response time.”  – Kenny Shannon, IT Director at Taos Academy

Ease of use

“It’s an intuitive system, so I find I don’t have to read forums and look through manuals as much to operate it. Which, unfortunately, is a common thing when adopting new products.”  – Kenny Shannon, IT Director at Taos Academy

About the School 

• 300+ students
• 50+ staff members
• 1 IT director
• 1 IT intern

Taos Academy (TA) is a state-funded charter school, serving grades 5-12, in New Mexico. The school opened in 2009, offering a hybrid learning model that combines direct and digital instruction. TA has a growing student body of several hundred students and over 50 faculty members. The school’s cybersecurity is managed by a single IT director, who has a broad range of other responsibilities.

The Challenge: Achieving Optimal Email Security Without Increasing Workload

TA faced a particular set of challenges when it came to the school’s email security and its vulnerability to phishing and spoofing attacks.

Email Overload 

School administrators and staff are inundated with many emails daily. This volume of emails, combined with a lack of experience in identifying suspicious emails, makes it challenging for administrators to identify phishing and spoofing attempts. Security training for faculty and staff can be a good second line of defense, but it is not enough to defend against more sophisticated phishing tactics. Staff might overlook security protocols and are prone to human error, even with regular security training.

An Insufficient Existing Email Security Solution 

TA was using Google Workspace, which offers basic email protection. However, this platform does not stop more sophisticated phishing attacks, rendering it an insufficient solution for TA’s data protection needs. Shannon needed a solution that would support Google Workspace and add an extra layer of security to their email system.

Limited IT Resources

With only one IT person responsible for all cybersecurity needs alongside a range of other IT tasks, Shannon was stretched thin. The heavy burden placed on his shoulders made it difficult to address security needs as promptly and thoroughly as he wanted to.

Delayed Response Time

Email security alerts, such as for domain blocking, often require immediate action to keep cyberthreats at bay. TA’s one-man IT team wasn’t always able to address email security fast enough.

Overly Complex Tools

TA’s security stack consisted of multiple tools that required complex configurations and ongoing upkeep. A lack of IT resources meant that Shannon needed a simpler and more self-sufficient tool when it came to adding an email security solution to his stack. He needed a tool that would handle critical security incidents without adding to the workload.

The Solution:

An Automated Security Tool that Resolves Email Security Threats While Reducing IT Workload

TA found Coro’s email security tool a time saving and workload reducing solution, that effectively safeguards against phishing and spoofing.

“A couple of other systems came up when I was researching for a solution, but they were not up to par with Coro,” Shannon said.

Products that offer email security mostly focus on training — sending mock phishing emails to staff to test their security competence. This ends up adding to administrators’ workload rather than reducing it. These solutions require administrators to attend periodic security training workshops and then implement security alertness in their daily practices.

Educational solutions alone slow them down and add to their stress. They also lend themselves to protocol oversights and human error. “While training capabilities and support may be good for certain purposes, they add to the workload of our staff, which goes against what I was trying to do,” Shannons said.

Coro proved to be an ideal solution because its focus isn’t solely on educating. It acts as a first line of defense, identifying suspicious emails early and blocking harmful ones before they make their way into the organization. On the side of educating email users, Coro offers the ability to send educational materials through the console. By using Coro, Shannon was able to protect his staff without adding to his own workload.

Shannon chose Coro for its automation capabilities, which caught things he had missed. 


“I wanted something that would be more comprehensive, more active, and participatory, especially when it came to the school administrators and office staff, because they are dealing with dozens and dozens of emails every single day,” he explained.

Shannon explained that Coro played a significant role in cutting down on critical response time. 

Shannon reports feeling the effects of Coro immediately.

“It completely altered workloads for myself, the administrators, and the school staff,” he said.

The onboarding process was seamless and effective. Thanks to Coro’s behavioral analysis, which molds and adjusts the tool over time, accuracy grew and security precision continued to evolve over time.

Initially, Coro didn’t recognize certain domains, such as those from the state or the local education department. However, after approving these flagged emails, Coro adapted and did not flag these domains again. That dramatically reduced the number of tickets he had to manually review.

Taos Academy was impressed with Coro’s continued evolution.

“The experience over the past year has been that the product keeps evolving. There were new features added over time,” Shannon recalled.

He noted that Coro is an intuitive product to begin with. “I don’t have to read forums and look through manuals as much to operate it. Which, unfortunately, is a common thing when adopting new products,” he explained.

Yet the improvements that are constantly being made make a significant change to functionality. “I don’t have to click around too much to figure out how to do what I want to do,” he summed up.

The Value: Ticking All the Boxes

The best thing Coro has given me is taking away the heavy lifting, Shannon concludes. It is a combination of time saved, a cost-effective approach, and the peace of mind that email security is covered.

Who We Are

Coro is a market leader in the modular security space, providing enterprise-grade cybersecurity to distributed businesses with lean IT teams. Relying on advanced AI capabilities, the Coro platform automatically detects, analyzes, and remediates security threats faced by today’s businesses, significantly reducing the security burdens placed on IT teams.

The company has been named a leader in G2-Grid for EDR/MDR, received Triple A grading (AAA) from the testing institute SE LABS, and won awards for best performer by customer reviews. Coro is based in Chicago with offices in New York City, London, Israel, and caters to over 5,000 customers globally.

Educational institutions can be a prime target for cybercriminals for a number of reasons. Lean IT teams with limited resources are responsible for managing a large network of students, faculty, and school communities, while overseeing dated infrastructures poorly equipped to deal with the requirements of the digital age. Schools also collect, store and must protect a wealth of valuable data including personal records and financial documents. Jointly these circumstances create the perfect storm for attackers to strike. 

Faced with such challenges, it is clear why education was listed as one of the six worst-performing cybersecurity sectors of 2022. This is in large part due to the volume of users logged into systems equipped with inadequate security protocols.

In 2023, nearly half (42%) of students and faculty reported circumventing security protocols regularly, with as many as 30% opening phishing emails more than once. In fact, 96% of IT admins report they don’t believe their schools are adequately secured, and 71% say the size of their IT teams relative to the security needs of the school render them underprepared, and unable to deal with security and regulatory needs.

Memphis Business Academy (MBA) is one of Coro’s education customers. The academy serves a student body of 1,700, with 170 faculty members, and only one IT professional managing the school’s security. Coro’s seamless reduction of IT workload has lead to exponential improvement to the school’s security posture. 

Similarly, Taos Academy, a 5th-12th grade charter school in New Mexico with a student body of approximately 170 and 13 faculty members is managed by a single IT director responsible for all security and compliance requirements. This school was able to fortify security and set a growing standard for security and compliance as it scales.   

Recent interviews with school IT admins found:

• 82% believed threats from admin interfaces were weakening their security posture 
• 73% believed that sluggish response times had dire effects on their security
• 81% believed insufficient network segregation and lack of siloed workspaces was affecting the school’s overall security
• 68% believed mismanaged authorization and authentication processes were weakening security

Crowdstrike 2024 Global Threat report, among other surveys

How Coro Helps Cybersecurity in Schools

Coro was founded in 2015 as a cloud security solution. Since introducing the current Coro platform in 2021, Coro has seen 300% year-over-year growth. Much of that growth is attributed to our trusted clients in the education sector, both private and public schools from k-12s through colleges, universities, and trade schools. The expansive cybersecurity coverage that Coro provides, alongside its ease of use and budget-conscious pricing, makes us an ideal solution for education.

Coro provides end-to-end security coverage that includes:

Critical Protection

Securing your data by identifying and blocking unauthorized access and flagging suspicious activity.

Regulatory Compliance

Assisting with safeguarding personal information, ensuring data privacy, limiting access to sensitive data.

Monitoring & Prioritization

Monitoring your cloud environments, endpoint devices, as well as user activity, remediating automatically, and prioritizing flagged vulnerabilities.


One Interface, One Endpoint Agent

Answering all your security needs in one dashboard, one database, and one endpoint agent.

Automated Security

Automatically resolving 95% of security alerts, and helping you resolve the 5% remaining tickets requiring manual resolution. 


Expertise & Support

Supporting clients through the experts at our 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC).

A Four-Pillared Solution for Optimal Security and Compliance

Educational institutions must navigate a complex landscape of compliance requirements that protect student and faculties’ education records, personal data, and financial records. These regulations can be specific to education institutions, such as PPRA, or more generally applicable to schools, for example COPPA.

Coro helps our customers manage their data privacy policies based on predefined data types. By defining who in the organization is authorized to access sensitive information, organizations can reduce the risk of non-compliance. Coro provides a suite of tools and capabilities. It is a vital part of a school’s overall data compliance effort.

Monitoring & Mitigation of Security Threats

Offering the full range of security solutions schools need makes Coro the ultimate answer to small IT teams. Coro offers ease of use alongside reliability, dramatically reducing the risk of misconfigurations, alert fatigue, IT admin burnout, and threats gone unnoticed.

Budget Consciousness

Coro’s modular approach was designed to fit the needs and budgets of lean IT teams. Our solution allows users to add or remove modules based on changing needs and budgets. Combined with automation capabilities that resolve 95% of security alerts without the need for IT intervention, Coro dramatically reduces workloads and the need for IT professionals. 

Peace of Mind

Combining all security needs in one platform offers the triple benefit of preventing misconfigurations, reducing blind spots associated with juggling multiple vendors, and providing an integrated experience for security and compliance needs. Coro’s ability to provide an end-to-end security solution, equipped with add-on services by in-house SOC specialists where needed, amounts to much more than a security solution – it equals improved confidence.

Who We Are

Coro is a market leader in the modular security space, providing enterprise-grade cybersecurity to distributed businesses with lean IT teams. Relying on advanced AI capabilities, the Coro platform automatically detects, analyzes, and remediates security threats faced by today’s businesses, significantly reducing the security burdens placed on IT teams.

The company has been named a leader in G2-Grid for EDR/MDR, received Triple A grading (AAA) from the testing institute SE LABS, and won awards for best performer by customer reviews. Coro is based in Chicago with offices in New York City, London, Israel, and caters to over 5,000 customers globally.