IAM for Higher Education

Higher education organisations are faced with the challenge of an ever-changing user population consisting of students, staff, alumni, visitors and more. Managing thousands of users and their access requires Identity and Access Management (IAM) to ensure security and compliance requirements are met.

Now more than ever, universities need to digitalise to keep pace with international students, remote applications and working or studying from home. Understanding the relationship between the users in your organisation and where all the data is for those users is the key to success with digital transformation.

Identity is often an afterthought or steppingstone along the way when it should sit at the core of security and digitalisation. But what does this involve?

Students enter, leave and change their position within a higher education organisation on a frequent basis. The period in which students enter and leave the institution is concentrated, meaning sometimes thousands of students need login credentials at the same time. Delays in on-boarding creates poor user experience and delays in off-boarding can pose a risk to security. This is also true for staff, visitors, alumni and contractors who interact with the organisation.

An IAM solution can automate user lifecycle processes to avoid human error and save time, effort and money.

For example, when a student leaves a university, you may want to revoke their access at a certain time after they graduate. Or you may want their role to change to ‘alumnus’ and have their access rights automatically change accordingly.

Thousands of users mean thousands of passwords and many password resets. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) verifies the user's identity using two or more pieces of evidence. For example, a student may require a code from their phone to access certain data in the system.

Adaptive MFA considers other factors and context when authenticating a user. For example, if a student needs to access the university system from abroad, an extra layer of authentication may be required to verify that the user is who they say they are.

Similarly for staff members, MFA can reduce or eliminate the need for passwords by using biometrics or other forms of authentication. This can improve user experience and facilitate processes involved with the staff member's job.

Security leaders at higher education organisations should understand that cyber-attacks commonly involve entry to the system via an identity followed by exploitation of privileged access. Privileged or elevated accounts in your systems can access sensitive data and applications, so it is paramount that you secure and monitor them.

PAM protects the accounts in your system with the most access. Enhanced access controls reduce the risk of a hacker moving laterally within the network. For example, privileged account passwords may be stored and frequently randomised to avoid credential theft which could lead to lateral or vertical movement of a user in a system.

Monitoring your privileged account exposure is fundamental to your approach to identity security. With PAM, you can mitigate the risk of a security breach through consistent controls and user behaviour analytics.