Overview
ARX For Education
Education ranks 3rd in the top targets of security breaches, accounting for 13% of data breaches, says a report in The Tech Advocate. Across a recent span of 7 years, more than 500 universities suffered a data breach of some kind. Educational institutions store a significant amount of sensitive data ranging from research to test documents to personal student information; even information of their parents remains in the school’s database. As educational institutions incorporate more technology into their classrooms and administrative offices, information security is becoming increasingly vital.
So, is your institution data-secure?
Threats
Challenges Galore
Outdated Legacy systems
The current computer systems in educational institutions are prone to all kinds of cyber-attacks, including ransomware, phishing email and denial of service attacks. The institution’s database contains information of all students and their parents. So, if the legacy systems are not upgraded, it is open to breach and important information can be stolen. In some cases, institutions add new technology, but fail to expand their cyber security protocols.
Unsecured Database System
The database of any school is its lifeline and measures the efficiency and robustness of their organisational structure. The database allows the institutions to easily monitor each student individually, as well as send out important announcements and connect with the parents. In most institutions, the database is not secured enough, which leads to the destruction of the streamlined process, and setting that right becomes an expensive affair.
Open Learning Environment
Universities today use a lot of technology. There is an app for everything – for canteen, for checking attendance, for events being organised, transportation – just about everything. The open learning environment in the institutions facilitates teachers and students to communicate via email, tablets and smart devices. Unauthorised access and authentication pose an immense threat as the institution itself could be subject to hackers or other vulnerabilities.
Solutions
The ARX Advantage
Single sign-on
At many educational institutions, there is a practice of using multiple passwords; it becomes difficult for the faculty as well as the students to remember each and every password.
Single sign-on
At many educational institutions, there is a practice of using multiple passwords; it becomes difficult for the faculty as well as the students to remember each and every password. The consequence? They keep weak passwords which can be easily hacked.
There is an easy solution to this – using the same user id and password across all systems that you are going to use. With the Single Sign-On (SSO), instead of a password for every application, users have one password to remember. With that single sign-on, they can get access to all their applications. SSO assures that the users have a strong password. Also, it eliminates the need of a middleman to reset passwords time and again.
SSO makes IT’s life easier, students and faculty happier, and your institution more secure.
With SSO,
- We provide efficient, cost-effective and nimble identity infrastructure for IT at the institution
- Help users increase their productivity as they can seamlessly connect to multiple IT resources using the same credentials
- Mitigate risk of having lost, weak and shared passwords, by restricting access to services via various intelligent integrations like OAuth, SAML, and RSA
Enforce Strong Authentication
A 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report examined the patterns in breaches and found that Miscellaneous Errors and Web Applications are involved in most instances.
Enforce Strong Authentication
A 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report examined the patterns in breaches and found that Miscellaneous Errors and Web Applications are involved in most instances. And, not surprisingly, over 80 percent of breaches involved stolen credentials. You need to protect your data against phishing and other attacks by securing your applications and access points. Using smart authentication prevents criminals from logging in with stolen credentials.
The solution – Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Traditional usernames and passwords can be stolen, and they’ve become increasingly vulnerable to brute force attacks. MFA creates multiple layers of security, resulting in efficient and diligent authentication. This ensures that the user requesting access is actually who they claim to be.
With MFA, a cybercriminal may steal one credential, but will be thwarted by having to verify identity in a different manner. MFA is an effective way to provide enhanced security for all your IT resources including cloud, on-premise and mobile.
- We help enable ‘MFA Everywhere’ on-premise with our strong integration support
- Starting from simple question-answers to fingerprint authentication and random pin generation device, any of these can be deployed for the MFA needs. All these can be configured using easy steps
User Management
Manual user management is error-prone and labour intensive. Educational institutions need a powerful system that can manage applications and ensure secure, fast app access for students, faculty, staff and alumni.
User Management
Manual user management is error-prone and labour intensive. Educational institutions need a powerful system that can manage applications and ensure secure, fast app access for students, faculty, staff and alumni. Leveraging automated user management also streamlines role-based access control. This ensures a seamless user experience.
ARX helps onboarding new users quickly. Along with security suite features like authentication, access controls, privileges, entitlements, single sign-on & security policies and activity auditing across organisation, they can also create an error-free workflows as well.
With a better User Management,
- Bulk onboarding with exact required privileges can be performed easily
- Deboarding at ease without any worries
- With maker-checker workflow, one can be absolutely sure who is going to do what
Visibility, Detection and Response
Data security incidents can shut down the business of your institution. Educational institutions have been under threat in the recent past, and the numbers stated in various studies stand testimony to this very fact.
Visibility, Detection and Response
Data security incidents can shut down the business of your institution. Educational institutions have been under threat in the recent past, and the numbers stated in various studies stand testimony to this very fact. Such incidents should not be the first time an institution thinks about how such an incident can occur or what is the solution to such a problem; they should cover preparation, detection and analysis, containment and eradication, recovery and post-incident analysis. This is where ARX can help the institution. With life cycle-managed users, Access Controls and Authorisation Access can be easily managed and mapped. Along with a maker-checker workflow, the educational institution will also have visibility on how that is done and by whom. With a clear visibility and detection mechanism in place, they can also respond to any threat, which otherwise could leave them exposed.
- One-stop shop for single login for users and one unified identity infrastructure for IT
- Integration with existing security tools
- Maker-checker workflow helps identify unusual and suspicious behaviours
- ARX API services can be used to enrich and extend the cyber security ecosystem; this is supported by helping to generate extensive reports for a deep dive into what is happening
- Can be easily integrated with the existing application with ARX using REST APIs for:
- Primary Authentication
- Multi-Factor Authentication
- User Management
- Password Management
- Validate and Get Entitlement
- Role-based access control –granular application-level access controls using entitlement policies that can be assigned to roles
- Users get access to resources based on their role. Access rights are grouped by role name,
and access to resources is restricted to users who have been authorised to assume the
associated role
Sign up for a
demo today!
Let us take you through our state of the art ARX suite of security services which will provide you with end to end security for user identification, authentication, single sign on, authorization and entitlements.