There’s a common misconception about zero trust. It presumes that higher education institutions must make costly financial investments in newfangled security products in order to protect themselves from the scourge of cybercrime. Very little of that is true. The zero-trust philosophy — put simply as the implementation of a security architecture that automatically denies access to everyone before analyzing permissions to determine which people and/or devices can access which areas of a technology IT ecosystem — is not a product one can buy. There is no shiny new tool that will, on its own, set ..read more

The federal government responded to the changing higher education landscape in the early part of this decade by making significant grant funds available to colleges and universities to promote student safety and help institutions offer remote and hybrid instruction. Those funds, most notably the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, expired last year, and while the cutoff was expected, the gap in funding may have left some administrators searching for additional dollars to transform university technology. One area where higher education institutions can still tap into government funding and ..read more

Anyone versed in the use of security cameras is familiar with the DORI standard: When surveying a site, the decision about where to position a device will affect the camera’s detection, observation, recognition and identification capabilities. While universities in the market for a physical security upgrade don’t need to understand everything about DORI, they should be prepared to help their vendors position cameras for maximum coverage. Here are a few considerations when you’re ready to begin your site assessment. CASE STUDY: Learn more about how Bowie State deve ..read more

The benefits of device management are fairly straightforward. It’s a tool (or set of tools) that removes the human element from deploying, maintaining, securing and replacing the laptops, desktops, tablets and smartphones that power higher education. So, why isn’t every university IT team in the country outsourcing device management? The answer to that is also fairly straightforward: Higher education is in the midst of belt-tightening, and device management programs mean that institutions are asked to spend money on something that almost any trained IT person could do just as well. That’s an ..read more

The attendance, performance and other data students generate during each academic year can paint a vivid picture of their college experience, including what factors contribute to or undermine the likelihood that they’ll graduate. That information could prove increasingly important as institutions edge closer to the enrollment cliff, when a reduction in high school graduating class size is expected to cause a steep drop-off in higher education enrollment as early as 2025. Although enrollment increased in fall 2023, it decreased in the three years prior, according to a National Student ..read more

A common misconception in higher education is that colleges and universities focus primarily on the success of the learners enrolled on campus. After all, that’s when they are under the care of an institution, learning in their chosen area of study, engaging in co-curricular activities and possibly living under the school’s banner. However, this is only one part of a larger student lifecycle, and as the 2025 enrollment cliff looms, it’s getting harder to attract new learners from a decreasing pool of prospective students. Institutions that invest in the people and tools that inform the entire ..read more

Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting higher education institutions. Ransomware attacks in the sector, for instance, were up 70 percent in 2023, according to a report from Malwarebytes. And a Sophos survey suggests that the average recovery cost can top $1 million per incident. In recent years, as cyberattacks have become more nuanced, the firewall technology that colleges and universities use to prevent them has also evolved. While schools may have once relied primarily on hardware servers that inspected incoming and outgoing network traffic, subsequent next-generation firewalls ..read more

Today’s college libraries are gathering places as much as they are spots where students come to read. When it came time to renovate Sam Houston State University’s Newton Gresham Library, staff knew that the focus was going to be on a lot more than books. After five decades serving students, the library was ready for an upgrade — and not just in the way its visitors perused their reading material. The original library was designed primarily for the needs of individual learners, who needed quiet spaces to read and study, but that’s not what today’s students are looking for. Higher education is ..read more

Device management in higher education is a never-ending task, whether IT teams like it or not. There are many tools available to help colleges and universities stay on top of device management. There are reliable device management platforms — such as Jamf for iOS devices and Windows Autopilot for PCs — for tagging and tracking thousands of laptops and tablets. There are also various asset management programs keeping the applications powering those devices up to date. But even the most thoroughly mapped-out lifecycle management plan, IT teams can’t prevent the ..read more

Good digital signage is one of the best ways to impart critical information to viewers exactly when and where they need it. For colleges, informational displays can be used to provide everything from directions around campus to schedules for sports and entertainment events. And unlike static signage, good digital displays can be updated as often as needed and can even be centrally managed. A project to implement digital signage across a campus can be stymied by two problems. First, it’s not usually possible to use common, noncommercial displays because they have no native management features ..read more