Identity and Access Management for Education
WHY IAM FOR EDUCATION
Education Institutions are often overlooked when one thinks about cybersecurity. Financial and healthcare organizational needs come first when it comes to a discussion about sensitive data and ways to protect it. This might be a key contributing reason for the lack of dedicated solutions to meet the unique demands of the education industry. However, educational institutions house data of students, staff, faculty, research material, and so on – and all of this is equally sensitive information.
KEY CHALLENGES IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
Cyberattacks are rampant in the Education sector – In June 2020, a college was at the end of a ransomware attack with a demand of more than $1 million. In another case, an ed-tech platform was breached in May 2020, with more than 22 million user accounts exposed.
Schools and universities have Personally Identifiable Information (PII), healthcare, and financial data of students, their guardians, and faculty. Such data is invaluable to bad actors as well. Several cyber attack attempts are often made and institutions are usually unprepared to deal with them.
- Educational institutions have been infamous for resorting to legacy IT infrastructure. This situation is changing with more of them seeing value in imbibing cutting-edge technology. However, majority of institutes still use an infrastructure that isn’t equipped to dealing with the latest security threats.
- BYOD is a big part of this landscape. Students use a multitude of devices and teachers often use their own devices as well. Without appropriate guidelines on how to secure them, they are often without basic antivirus functionalities. If one device is hacked, it could put the entire network at risk.
- Managing the student lifecycle seamlessly is essential. However, a lot of discrepancies exist as students change roles, classes, acquire newer privileges or even become alumni. Managing their accesses for each requirement is a challenging and is prone to errors if undertaken manually.
- Adhering to compliance standards is essential for educational institutions as well. FERPA, FOIA, PPRA are some regulations that protect data and implement stringent security mechanisms. However, complying with them without professional help is an uphill task.
- Many universities have students working on research projects that can contain valuable information – it could even be military-grade information. They also closely work with government agencies, tech companies, start-ups with brimming ideas, and more. This leads to dealing with several proprietary information as well. Securing them has to be a priority.
- Educational institutions rely on email chains for passing assignments and conveying information. Considering the state of improper BYOD, phishing attempts could lead to severe data breaches.
- Lack of in-house cybersecurity experts which puts the burden on the few IT professionals to handle everything end to end in this large digital ecosystem. It often backfires as they aren’t prepared to deal with the growing complications.
OUR SOLUTIONS
Cross Identity implements a security posture for the unique demands of educational institutions.
- Cross Identity (Formerly Ilantus) Access Management capabilities can provide a seamless front-end experience while students and faculty use applications and other sensitive resources. With single sign-on solutions, they can access all of it with a single click.
- Password management with self-service capabilities provides a seamless experience to reset passwords and account unlock without burdening the helpdesk and IT professionals, freeing their time for crucial issues.
- Managing the lifecycle of students from the day they arrive to the end of their course and then as alumni are automated with a lifecycle management solution. The predefined workflows provide access on day one and leave no room for error.
- These institutions are privy to a lot of temporary identities. Exchange students, guest faculty, temporary lecturers, students learning through correspondence courses – all of them have unique identity demands and different from the regular identities. We create workflows for such temporary and ad-hoc access requests, such that accesses are provided and revoked without compromising on the security of applications.
- Identity Governance and Administration solution can ensure all the accesses that are provided and identities that exist in the system are protected. Regular monitoring and automated elevation of security mechanisms provide an edge to their security.
- Identity analytics provide round-the-clock security with a capable risk engine. This system weeds out false alarms and deals with most small-scale alerts on its own and alerts the respective people only when there a dire need for human intervention.
WITH COMPACT IDENTITY, YOU EXPERIENCE:
Seamless User Experience
High ROI
Rapid User Adoption
Internal and External Security
Enhanced Productivity
Empowering Digital Transformation
Choose Cross Identity Compact, a converged IAM solution that provides all the above solutions in one platform.
Empower your students to reach greater heights while you protect their data.
