Today, institutions of higher education face a dizzying array of regulations. These regulations increasingly force colleges and universities to adopt stronger security measures as they combat more and more cybersecurity threats. Many of these regulations mandate two-factor authentication (2FA) to ensure that the right person is accessing sensitive information.

Many of our customers implement our Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform for its identity lifecycle management capabilities. And with good reason—automating these tasks means IT no longer has to waste valuable time and resources creating and managing accounts or provisioning and deprovisioning systems and target applications.

In an era of constant cyberthreats, enterprises are looking to beef up their security posture. A strategy being used by more and more companies is multi-factor authentication (MFA).

One of the most secure authentication methods is Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Universal Second Factor (U2F), an emerging universal standard for tokens with native support in platforms and browsers.

Does your university have a shadow IT problem? The answer is most likely yes. Higher education institutions across the country are struggling with shadow IT challenges resulting from devices, services, and software residing outside of IT’s control and/or ownership.

Your organization likely realizes the unfettered access that traditional IT privileged accounts provide and has taken proactive steps to lock down access to these accounts. But what about critical business systems that offer the ability to cause reputational damage or that provide access to monetizable data, such as protected health information (PHI), credit card numbers, and social security numbers?

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.

No single access methodology can effectively manage every access use case across an organization. While Role-Based and Attribute-Based Access Controls (RBAC and ABAC) can cover the majority of a given user’s access needs, neither method is ideally suited for every use case; there will always be exceptions.

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.