With the explosion of the number of cyberthreats, higher education institutions are struggling to secure their IT infrastructures in the face of limited budgets and staff. Add to this the decentralized nature of these institutions, and you have a recipe for cyber disaster.

Traditionally, privileged accounts are IT-based and have special active directory (AD) attributes. IT administrators use them to log into servers, switches, routers, and applications and perform tasks without restriction.

Legacy security systems focus on protecting these AD privileged accounts, and with good reason: Once obtained by hackers, the accounts can be used to access the most sensitive data, lock out legitimate users, and create ghost accounts and back doors that are not easily seen.

In our last post, we discussed the cybersecurity talent shortage and its impact on the IT industry. The enormous gap between the industry’s needs and the actual pool of qualified employees has left many IT departments and security teams with a shortage of qualified personnel, resulting in an overwhelming workload that only exacerbates security events and data breaches.

If you are thinking of moving to the cloud or have already started that transition, you’re in good company. An impressive 80 percent of school districts are using cloud-based software. It’s easy to see why.

The cloud offers many benefits for students, educators, and administrators. Students are able to learn technology skills, collaborate with other students, hold group discussions online, and get valuable information from outside experts.

There have been a slew of major data breaches in recent years. The number of records exposed in data breaches last year alone reached 174.4 million—close to five times the 36.6 million records exposed in 2016, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.

At the end of 2017, the first deadline passed to comply with a new set of federal regulations that will force colleges and universities that enter into contracts with federal agencies to tighten their cybersecurity practices. The Department of Education has made it clear that it will compel universities and colleges to comply with NIST’s Special Publication 800-171, which is designed to protect the confidentiality of controlled unclassified information (CUI).

Identity Automation supports OpenID Connect (OIDC), a modern and secure authentication protocol based on OAuth 2.0 authorization framework. Our customers can now use OIDC with RapidIdentity products and services, including Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

The IT industry is facing an enormous problem: there’s a skills shortage of cybersecurity talent. Forty-five percent of organizations report a “problematic shortage” of cybersecurity skills—more than any other area of IT. The problem is so bad that the cybersecurity workforce gap is on pace to hit 1.8 million by 2022, a 20% increase from 2015.

Passwords are widely recognized as one of the weakest links in an organization’s security. In fact, 81 percent of hacking-related data breaches last year were the result of weak, default, or stolen passwords, according to Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations report.

The role of mobile technologies within the field of law enforcement continues to grow in both importance and number of applications. Law officers count on these technologies for much more than simply receiving dispatch calls or looking up arrest records. Officers are using mobile devices in the field for capturing photo evidence, fingerprinting suspects at the scene, conducting interviews, issuing tickets and citations, managing personnel tracking and deployment, and much more.