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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you hear about retail establishments suffering from a data breach, names like Neiman Marcus, Target, The TJX Companies, Michaels, and The Home Depot dominate the headlines. When you read these news stories, it might appear as if cyber criminals are only going after the big fish. Unfortunately, this might lull small and mid-sized businesses into thinking that they are not likely to be the targets of such an attack. This is supported by recent research that shows that more than three-quarters of all SMBs believe that they are safe from to cyber attacks.

The truth is, small and medium sized retailers make up 62 percent of the data-breach victim pool, because attackers know that small and mid-sized businesses are:

Seasonal employees play a vital role in the operations of retail organizations. In many industries, a full-time worker is categorized as someone who works 40+ hours a week and is on a salary. However, for retail organizations, a full-time worker is someone who works twelve months out of the year. The many employees who did not fit that definition are considered seasonal workers.