Each year, the United States hosts over a million foreign students. And for the schools they attend, this often means complying with rules and regulations that these students bring with them from their home countries. 

Last week, we released our top IAM blog posts of 2018. This week, we’re narrowing our focus to the education space. K12 and higher education face unique identity and access management (IAM) challenges that we’ve covered in a number of posts this year. We’ve sifted through these posts and pull a sampling of this year’s best education-focused IAM content.

Last month, a group of our higher education experts packed their bags and traveled to Denver, Colorado to participate in the much anticipated 2018 EDUCAUSE Annual convention. Once there, they enjoyed three action-packed days completely dedicated to technology in higher education.

Delivering an optimal student and alumni experience is top requirement for CIOs at higher education institutions. More and more, this puts pressure on them to provide an optimal digital experience, as technology and cloud resources continue to play a growing role on college campuses.

While higher education institutions face many of the same identity and access management (IAM) challenges as corporations, they also must overcome a number of complex and unique hurdles that typically aren’t seen in corporate enterprise deployments.

In our last post, we discussed the growing role of two-factor authentication (2FA) in university security as more and more federal regulations are advocating or flat-out mandating its implementation.

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.

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.

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.

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).