As educators around the country look toward mobile and internet applications to enhance student learning, new privacy concerns are beginning to surface. These student information security woes are often beyond the reach of the IT administrators, and instead put into the hands of teachers who may unintentionally cause sensitive data to be released with as little as a simple app sign-up. Unlike many of the historic applications used by school systems in the past, today’s apps circumvent federal privacy regulations by providing educational tools to teachers from third-party platforms that are often notvetted by IT administrators in advance.

At Identity Automation, we bet big on user experience from day one. We started with the premise of UI designs for new self-service and delegation tools. During our early days, I had worked with numerous vendor products, all of which I felt were overly complicated and more constrained than they needed to be. Since then we have continued to innovate. 

Built with the future of user experience in mind, today we released RapidIdentity 3.3, which includes some exciting new feature additions to RapidIdentity. 

We are headed to Austin, Texas next week for the 2015 Texas CTO Clinic, covering the key issues facing ed tech leaders in Texas and beyond. 

The Minnesota school system is defying expectations with their innovative approach to technology. As a K-12 institution driving the achievement of over 8,500 students, Minnetonka Public Schools approached us looking for a better solution to solve the confusion that their previous single sign-on platform had created.

At the end of April we published a couple pieces of content focused on rogue employees, a security threat facing nearly every company in the world. Rogue employees are those fully vetted users inside your company who probably have no malicious intent to cause harm, but end up doing so regardless, for a variety of reasons ranging from laziness to oversights to hoarding access.

After Houston SecureWorld, we hit the pavement again and headed for IT Summit 2015 in Houston last week. We found that our mission to educate enterprises and education institutions about the dangers of rogue employees is also the war cry of others! 

Last week, a couple of us on the Identity Automation team attendedHouston SecureWorld 2015 courtesy of a special invite from the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA). Many thanks to our friends at ISSA for the opportunity to serve on their behalf.

A few weeks ago, James Litton and I touched down in Munich to speak at Kuppingercole's European Identity & Cloud Conference 2015, where we also had the pleasure of speaking with innovation leaders shaping the future of IT. I wanted to share some of my thoughts and observations from the event:

Student privacy is an extremely delicate topic, important to parents, teachers, administrators, researchers, and students themselves. When we explored the history of student privacy legislation last week, we found a great deal of tension between the legal definition of student privacy and public perceptions of what privacy should be.

In February, we announced that we joined over 100 organizations, including Apple, Google, the Khan Academy and Microsoft in supporting the Student Privacy Pledge. Then in March, at both the Brainstorm 16.0 Conference and CoSN Annual Conference, student privacy surfaced as a leading topic of discussion.