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.

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).

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.

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.