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.

As the number of employees, vendors, contractors, and departments within an organization grows, so too does the complexity associated with managing access to a growing number of applications and systems.

System administrators commonly manage this complexity by preemptively creating more roles for exceptions and edge use cases. And organizations with more limited or older legacy Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems often have no choice but to handle new access requests by assigning new roles to a user.

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.

While complying with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) can be a challenge for any organization, there are specific hurdles to compliance for higher education. 

It’s a new year and it’s time to figure out what purchases, projects, and services your organization will need in the near future. No doubt, your wish list will far exceed your budget.

To meet your security needs within a budget, make sure you are investing enough in IT security by shoring up your identity and access management (IAM) program. In order to truly enable your business, you must first embrace security, and that means putting IAM at the core of your security program.

Despite the risks associated with remote third-party access and the ongoing slew of data breaches resulting from third-party breaches, outsourcing isn’t going away anytime soon. On the contrary, IT outsourcing will be a $335 billion industry by 2019, according to Gartner. The benefits to business productivity, efficiency, and collaboration are simply too great, and modern enterprises can’t compete without opening up their infrastructures and data.

In a recent post, we covered a major problem facing K-12 schools today: cybersecurity. Hackers are targeting educational institutions with alarming regularity—and the consequences of these delays can be major: If a student’s identity is stolen, it might not be discovered for years, until the student tries to take out a loan or get a credit card. 

As with any technology shift, there are many considerations and concerns surrounding a migration to the cloud, like how your existing software licenses transfer, what type of “cloud” you might need, reliability, and as always, security.

Breaches caused by outside hackers get the most press. For example, the recent Equifax breach that resulted in the release of confidential data on 143 million Americans was carried out by external hackers who may have been state sponsored. The breach resulted in Equifax’s chief executive officer, chief information officer, and chief security officer all losing their jobs. 

Data is found at every point in the process and just about everything inside of the IAM systems relies on that data. While we might sound like a broken record, the better shape your data is in, the more successful (and easier, faster, cheaper, and less painful) your IAM implementation and ongoing operations will be.