Last month, Identity Automation joined K12 school districts, colleges, and universities from around the state of Florida in Orlando for the FAEDS 2018 conference hosted by the Florida Association of Educational Data Systems.

Technology in the classroom creates usability issues for very young students in pre-k, kindergarten, and first grade, as well as special education students. For many of these students, remembering and typing even simple usernames and traditional passwords is a struggle.

Schools are integrating technology and cloud resources into the classroom with ever-growing frequency. Overall education technology spending is expected to reach $19 billion by 2019 on a global scale. It’s easy to see why: Technology in the classroom has the ability to increase collaboration and productivity, create a more personalized learning experience, and enable teachers to distribute assignments and provide real-time feedback.

If you are thinking of moving to the cloud or have already started that transition, you’re in good company. An impressive 80 percent of school districts are using cloud-based software. It’s easy to see why.

The cloud offers many benefits for students, educators, and administrators. Students are able to learn technology skills, collaborate with other students, hold group discussions online, and get valuable information from outside experts.

In a recent post, we covered a major problem facing K-12 schools today: cybersecurity. Hackers are targeting educational institutions with alarming regularity—and the consequences of these delays can be major: If a student’s identity is stolen, it might not be discovered for years, until the student tries to take out a loan or get a credit card. 

What is one of the biggest challenges facing K-12 schools today? It might surprise you, but the answer is “cybersecurity.” K-12 schools are a prime target for cyber attacks.

While they might not seem like the most obvious victims of a hack, K-12 schools are attractive for cyber criminals because they hold an enormous amount of student data—an increasingly attractive target for cyberthieves. Read on to learn more about the appeal of student information and why it’s at greater risk than ever for a data breach.

Last week, we released our top five most popular Enterprise IAM Blogs from 2017. This week, we want to take a look back at some of our favorite higher education and K12 education-related content. From ransomware, to managing transient users, to student data privacy, we’ve covered a wide range of key topics in the industry.

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.

Earlier this week, we released the most popular blog posts in 2016 from our Enterprise Blog. So today, we wanted to do the same with our K12 and higher education blog posts. After all, we’ve covered a variety of identity and access management (IAM) topics this year on our Education blog, including unique IAM challenges in higher ed, managing contingent users, provisioning users with multiple roles, and student data rostering.

This week, I’m heading to Sacramento, California for the 2016 CETPA Annual Conference. Held by the California Educational Technology Professionals Association (CETPA), the conference is attended by IT professionals from K-12 school districts throughout the state.