The education sector is currently far from outstanding in the area of cyber maturity. Far from what one might think, the importance of educational institutions does not lie solely in their ability to train the society of tomorrow, provide answers to problems that arise or develop new technologies. Much of their relevance lies in the billions of data that their systems store.
Indeed, organizations in the education sector manage huge amounts of sensitive information on a daily basis, such as contact details of students, families, teachers and other staff, financial or social security information, highly sensitive scientific research data, digital and connected medical equipment or online platforms.
Precisely for these reasons the education sector data is incredibly valuable, but also extremely vulnerable.
According to a recent report, in 2021 the education and research sector faced an average of 1,605 attacks per week, an increase of 75% over 2020.
Primary schools, major universities, scientific research centres… all these institutions are constantly at risk of suffering a catastrophic cyber incident. And this is hardly surprising given that the education sector faces many cybersecurity challenges, such as a lack of specialized personnel, expertise, or budget.w
To deal with this delicate situation, what the UK education sector needs is a Zero Trust approach that carefully controls access to critical assets, the implementation of the principle of Least Privilege, which manages privileged access to sensitive resources or the protection of remote access.
However, if you want to go a step further in protecting the most sensitive IT resources from ransomware, malware and cryptoviruses, Identity and Access Management solutions can ensure complete and robust infrastructure security by controlling user access to the ‘’crown jewels’’.
Want to learn more about how to effectively protect your organization from cyber-attacks?
Join us on WALLIX‘s Access and Identity Security FREE WEBINAR on Thursday, March 10th, and do not let hackers teach you a lesson!