As a marketing professional one of the most important jobs my team and I perform is building support and loyalty around our company’s brand. Building a brand the right way helps to create a strong community that believes strongly in our products, ultimately creating evangelists. Effective branding contributes to getting people fired up and ready to buy.

When we engage with a new IT team and ask how they are currently managing user identities and access, more often than not, they simply point to a single sign-on (SSO) portal. This inevitably prompts a clarifying discussion around the meaning of SSO.

Earlier this week, we released the most popular blog posts in 2016 from our Enterprise Blog. So today, we wanted to do the same with our K12 and higher education blog posts. After all, we’ve covered a variety of identity and access management (IAM) topics this year on our Education blog, including unique IAM challenges in higher ed, managing contingent users, provisioning users with multiple roles, and student data rostering.

What a year 2016 has been! With 2017 fast-approaching, we’ve decided to take a look back at some of our Enterprise blog highlights from the past year. From the risks of contingent workers, to upgrading legacy systems, to privileged access management, to single-sign-on – we’ve covered a wide range of identity and access management topics in 2016.

A recent survey conducted by Accenture found that over the past year, roughly one in three targeted attacks resulted in an actual security breach. When you consider that the average company faces more than one hundred focused attacks launched against them every year, these numbers are alarming. This equates to more than 30 successful data breaches every year against a single company, with just one data breach having the potential to result in millions of dollars in losses.

In previous installments of this series, we discussed the emergence of Identity as a Service (IDaaS) and the benefits it offers. We also cleared up some of the most common misconceptions surrounding IDaaS. Now that you have a better understanding of the technology and its potential, let’s examine the most common IDaaS models, so that you can choose the right one for your organization.

Back when enterprises began adopting identity and access management (IAM) solutions, like the one you might be using now, the focus was on passing compliance audits. However, the times have changed and so have the business and threat landscapes.

In our last post, we discussed some of the most compelling reasons for adopting identity and access management (IAM) in the cloud. Like most other cloud services, identity as a service (IDaaS) offers cost-effective, high availability and affordable scalability. However, as you consider the possibility of moving from your legacy, on-premises IAM system to the cloud, it’s vital that you begin with a clear understanding of common misperceptions that haunt the emerging IDaaS market; here are the two biggest ones:

It’s practically a given that at least some of your IT systems and operations are in now in the cloud. In fact, 70 percent of small businesses and 90 percent of midmarket enterprises do, and the rest must begin to do so soon or risk falling behind their competition. According to Cisco, 83 percent of all data center traffic will be based in the cloud within the next three years; 2017 will see a particularly significant migration of workloads moving to cloud-based platforms, with IT modernization leading the way.

Previously in our two-part series on the identity and access challenges unique to higher education, we discussed users with multiple roles, the increasing use of technology in the classroom, and limited budget and manpower. As you may already have guessed, these challenges are just the beginning.