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. 

The mergers & acquisitions (M&A) market is red hot, and there is a good chance your company will be involved in an M&A at some point in your career. The work that it takes to pull off a successful M&A, however, can be staggering, and 70-90 percent end up being considered abysmal failures.

So your company is buying a company….

This is undoubtedly a huge step forward for your organization and a reason for celebration, but if you’re part of the IT department, you might be more focused on the long list of important tasks to be done immediately after the contract is signed.

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.

Healthcare mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are happening more frequently than ever. In fact, 2017 was a banner year for M&As, with 115 transactions, including 10 deals between hospitals with a net revenue of over $1 billion—the highest number in recent history.

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 Part 1 of this series, we discussed the challenges that come with onboarding employees and granting access, specifically determining which permissions to give an employee, providing employees with day one access, and managing ad-hoc access requests.

Identity lifecycle management presents a number of challenges: You need to quickly onboard employees so that they have access to the applications needed to do their jobs, you need to immediately offboard them when they leave the organization so they’re not a security threat, and you need to ensure IT isn’t bogged down with all changes in between as employees shift roles, get promoted, change locations, and so on.

Let’s be real. Attackers are growing more and more emboldened by the day. As their tools become so simple that even “script kiddies” can use them to wreak havoc on unsuspecting targets, governing bodies are putting added emphasis on tighter regulatory compliance.