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.

Data is found at every point in the process and just about everything inside of the IAM systems relies on that data. While we might sound like a broken record, the better shape your data is in, the more successful (and easier, faster, cheaper, and less painful) your IAM implementation and ongoing operations will be.

In part one of our series on data, we discussed how data is the lifeblood of any IAM system. To recap, IAM systems manage the authentication and access of users to organizational systems, applications, and resources. Each user has an account that’s used to log into different applications and systems. Depending on who a user is and his or her attributes, the IAM system determines what the user has access to and what he or she can do within those systems.  

Data is the lifeblood of any Identity and Access Management (IAM) system. It can make or break an implementation. Complete and accurate data empowers your organization to provide users with an unbelievable set of tools that increase security, improve business processes, and reduce risk.  

When your company parts ways with employees, are you able to immediately terminate all access to corporate data? If not, you’re opening the organization up to a very real danger.

The majority of major data breaches in recent years have resulted from hackers gaining access to unmanaged and unprotected privileged accounts and credentials.

Privileged and services accounts are a significant risk because of the access they provide the user with access to an organization’s systems and data. These accounts can be used to access the most sensitive data, lock out legitimate users, and create ghost accounts and backdoors that are not easily seen.

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.

Another year, another Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), another depressing look into the state of global cybersecurity preparedness.  

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.