Visibility plays a key role in cybersecurity, especially for higher education institutions looking to incorporate zero-trust principles into how they defend their networks, data and more. Identifying and verifying users — what device they’re using, where they’re using it and where they should have permission to go — is the linchpin that secures the five pillars of zero trust and provides optimal protection for networks and university data.
One of the ways colleges and universities gain that visibility is with identity and access management tools, often used together as part of a broader IAM solution. Those tools are terrific resources. Yet, as everyone who works in cybersecurity knows, they can also become outdated in a heartbeat as part of the endless cat-and-mouse game between cyberattackers constantly altering their tactics and the developers of tools meant to thwart them.
The rationale behind initiatives such as application modernization is built in part on that understanding, and when it comes to security tools, modernization efforts take on additional urgency. A small vulnerability in, say, a multifactor authentication implementation can put an entire network at risk.
The same goes for the broader IAM ecosystem, write Asif Syed and Rizwan Malik, senior directors of IAM security practice at CDW. Here are three reasons they say modernizing those IAM implementations can pay off for higher education IT security teams.
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