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. 

Last week, we released our top five most popular Enterprise IAM Blogs from 2017. This week, we want to take a look back at some of our favorite higher education and K12 education-related content. From ransomware, to managing transient users, to student data privacy, we’ve covered a wide range of key topics in the industry.

Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies are now a necessity for universities and colleges across the country. In Part 1 of this series, we covered the positives and negatives of BYOD, as well as the security implications of such policies. In this post, we’ll go over how to easily implement secure BYOD using a modern identity and access management (IAM) platform.

Bring your own device, or BYOD, is a fast-growing trend on higher-education campuses across the country. In fact, at least 42 percent of U.S. colleges and universities have implemented a BYOD strategy. Meanwhile, bandwidth on campuses has nearly tripled since 2012, with more than 70 percent of schools offering at least 1 GB, in part because of the need to keep up with BYOD demand.

Around the world, colleges and universities are welcoming students, faculty, and staff back for the fall semester. Those who are new to campus will undoubtedly need a few days to find their way around, remember their class schedules, and, of course, memorize their newly issued usernames.

While the country as a whole has had more than seven years of recovery time since the Great Recession, many government agencies and institutions still find themselves struggling to fully mend. Across the U.S., many are still working to do more with less—a reality that is particularly true in public colleges and universities.

At colleges and universities across the country, a hidden danger is lurking. It may have once seemed innocent, but in today’s world, it is a legitimate threat: Custom identity and access management (IAM) solutions cobbled together with custom scripts.

A recent report, Cyber Criminals, College Credentials, and the Dark Web from Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), confirms what has long been feared: The problem of hackers stealing the usernames, passwords, and personal information of students and faculty from colleges and universities and selling this information on the dark web is greater than most realized.

While every business faces some level of transience in its operations—namely employee or customer churn—community colleges, by the nature of their business, face the issue on a massive scale. For example, At Lone Star College, the nation’s third-largest higher-education system, up to 40 percent of the schools’ 100,000 students are transient users.

2016 was the year of the hacker. From Russian hackers targeting US elections to the jaw-dropping compromise of more than 1 million Yahoo! user accounts and the DDoS attack that "broke the Internet," it seems like hacks and data breaches were in the news every day. Russian hackers aside, ransomware was the cybersecurity topic that captured the year’s headlines.