We recently wrote about delegated administration, a powerful Identity and Access Management (IAM) system feature and how it gives organizations the ability to assign control of of activities directly to business managers and system owners, as well as some common use case scenarios.

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.

In part 1 of our delegated administration blog series, we discussed how delegation is an Identity and Access Management (IAM) system feature that gives authorized individuals or groups of users the ability to view another user’s data and take some form of action on that user's account.

One of the most powerful features of any modern Identity and Access Management (IAM) system is delegated administration and management of users. With delegated administration, organizations can reassign control of identity management activities, such new account creation, role and group assignment, and access requests from the IT team to non-IT employees, such as business managers.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The role of mobile technologies within the field of law enforcement continues to grow in both importance and number of applications. Law officers count on these technologies for much more than simply receiving dispatch calls or looking up arrest records. Officers are using mobile devices in the field for capturing photo evidence, fingerprinting suspects at the scene, conducting interviews, issuing tickets and citations, managing personnel tracking and deployment, and much more.

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.