Within every market—whether it be government, business, healthcare or education—it’s crucial that identity and access management (IAM) solutions are designed and implemented with close adherence to the latest government, regulatory, and best practice security frameworks and laws, in order to help organizations meet their compliance goals and to ensure the integrity and security of their user data.

In 2017, ransomware, the use of weaponized encryption to block access to a computer system or service until a ransom is paid, is all the rage among hackers. In fact, ransomware is now one of the top three most common malware threats.

The situation is dire, with hackers requesting ransoms of up to $73,000 per attack. Ransomware payments totaled more than $1 billion in 2016, a massive jump from the mere $34 million paid in 2015.

Now that your C-suite understands your company’s information security program, it’s time to move further into the educational phase.

As you evaluate and prioritize the risks your organization faces, identity and access management (IAM) should become a clearer and clearer priority. To help you educate your CEO on the need for increased investment in modern IAM solutions, here is some key IAM terminology that you can use as you work to transition your company to a more modern strategy.  

By now, we should all be aware of the inadequacies of passwords. Breach after breach, it's been made painfully clear that single-factor authentication is not enough. But when the traditional means of authentication are so clearly flawed, what’s the next step?

Generally speaking, the best practice is to step-up your security with either two-factor or multi-factor authentication. As these standards have quickly become essential parts of the information security toolkit, they've also become top-of-mind considerations for many IT and security pros.

*Disclaimer: This article originally appeared on IDG Connect. 

Over the past few years, Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) have become three of the hottest topics in Information Technology circles. The growing demand for compliance with federal and state laws, as well as industry best practices, has necessitated a closer look at IT governance, as well as solutions that help to ensure an organization has invested their time and efforts wisely, through management and implementation of such technologies as access control, data protection, and identity provisioning and management. Proper design, application, and usage of these key technologies (and others) help to control necessary risk management activities and ease the efforts that are required to remediate or address areas where compliance is lacking. 

*Disclaimer: This article originally appeared in eSchool News. 

Student data privacy is quite a different topic from the headlines most people read concerning data breaches. It is not about malicious intruders hacking or stealing credentials to get into a system to steal corporate intellectual property or records to sell on the dark web. Student data privacy concerns, specifically, center on the misuse of personally identifiable information, known by its acronym PII.

Are you using an identity and access management (IAM) solution designed for the enterprise to manage user identities and access privileges at your community college or university? If so, then you’ve likely already run into some serious difficulties—and if you haven’t yet, it’s only a matter of time. An increasingly complex IT environment and growing number of users that require access to systems and data have made user identity and permissions management more challenging than ever, particularly in higher-education institutions.

One of the most concerning trends for 2016 seems to be "Another day, another healthcare data breach." Breaches are becoming an all too regular occurrence and not just among healthcare providers. Retailers, credit and financial institutions, entertainment giants, and even governmental agencies are falling prey to the hackers, and in many cases are allowing access to very private customer data, at an alarming rate.

The easiest way to show success is through tangible measurement. When you roll out a new project or implement a new system, you can say that you think it’s working, but without evidence, you really can’t be sure. That is why metrics are so important to a business. Metrics enable an organization to know if productivity is up or if costs are down. They can also measure whether security has improved and identify opportunities to enhance processes. These reasons are precisely why it is so crucial to track identity and access management (IAM) metrics.

According to NRF, the retail industry annually hires between 700,000 and 750,000 seasonal workers for the holiday season. There is no reason to think that 2016 will be any different, with many retailers already ramping up their recruiting efforts for the November and December sales push.