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Simon Horwith
Interim Chief Technology Officer
"I don't worry about compliance so much as just best practices. I don't want a data breach on my watch," explains Simon Horwith, the technology leader at Mary McDowell Friends School, a Quaker school for students with learning disabilities in Brooklyn, New York. The school’s mission of serving students with learning disabilities makes data protection not just a compliance requirement but a privacy issue.
As a specialized learning environment, the school handles an above-average volume of sensitive information. Beyond standard educational records, they manage a continuous flow of neuropsychological evaluations, medical records, and detailed student assessments.
This creates a complex data protection challenge that goes far beyond typical PII concerns, factoring in PHI and HIPAA compliance for almost all students.
"For us, that's a lot more than just PII data – it's health information,” says Horwith. “And any time you're dealing with anything to do with individuals under 18 years old, whether it's photographs or information about them, you have to handle it very sensitively."
Before implementing Virtru, the school relied heavily on discouraging staff and parents from sending sensitive information via email – a strategy that was losing practicality, urging Horwith and his team to look into an email protection solution.
"Data was being stored encrypted, but transmission of data wasn't encrypted," Horwith explains. "We were really just doing everything we could to discourage parents from using email to submit this kind of information, but they still would. You just kind of cross your fingers and hope there's no data breach."
With experience using Virtru in a previous role, Horwith knew it could provide the perfect balance of security and usability. After evaluating other solutions, none matched Virtru's ease of deployment and user-friendly interface – crucial factors for a community with varying levels of technical expertise.
"I looked at a few solutions that were out there. None of them seemed worth exploring," Horwith says. "Having used Virtru before, none of them looked as easy to deploy and use for our end users."
The implementation process was remarkably smooth, taking less than a day from start to finish. "Took me less than an hour to have it configured on our side," Horwith recalls. "I spent an hour and a half or two hours creating custom how-to's and recorded a 10-minute video of myself playing with it... and deployed it in less than a day."
The reception was overwhelmingly positive, with users immediately embracing the platform.
"Not a single person had a problem... everybody found it very intuitive, easy to use. I haven't had to support anybody yet."
One of the most significant benefits has been enabling secure communication with parents, who regularly need to share updated medical information, new diagnoses, and evaluation results. The solution needed to be simple enough for parents to use while maintaining robust security.
"Parents are always sending new information from physicians and psychiatrists or psychologists. It can happen at any time," Horwith explains. "We need it to be as easy as possible, and email is fortunately very easy for everybody to use. That's kind of why I leaned into Virtru—you don't have to be a rocket scientist to use it."
When asked about the impact of implementing Virtru, Horwith quantifies it in terms of risk reduction: "Our exposure or risk level before was probably somewhere around 70 or 80 out of 100. Now it would be zero to 10. It's significantly improved our ability to not worry about a data breach."
For other organizations considering Virtru, Horwith's recommendation is unequivocal: "I would recommend it in a heartbeat. Any time somebody tells me 'I can't afford to do that,' I say, 'Honestly, you can't afford to not have this.' The alternatives that would be much lower cost are just not good solutions."
The implementation of Virtru has transformed how the school handles sensitive information, providing peace of mind for administrators while maintaining the ease of use that staff and parents need. In an environment in which teachers and parents collaborate on student growth and development, Mary McDowell Friends School chose Virtru to do the same with its sensitive data.
