Page 6 - Campus Technology, May/June 2018

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SECURITY AND THE INTERNET OF THINGS
GAMECHANGER
RETHINKING HOW TECHNOLOGY IS USED IN EDUCATION
ZERO TRUST IN HIGHER ED
The “trust but verify” approach to security is no longer sufficient in the always-on world.
DESPITE USER SECURITY TRAINING and other se- curity protection layers are in place, users are most often the weak link. One click of a phishing e-mail can tuck malware into the recesses of a computing device or expose a server that attackers could use to escalate access to other parts of the network. This is one reason why former Forrester analyst John Kindervag tightened the bolts on the security philosophy “Trust but verify.” He updated it with a simple mandate: “Zero trust.”
This concept is particularly relevant in higher education; where students, faculty, and staff are online all the time, says Ram Cholan, solutions engineer for Akamai Technol- ogies. “It’s not like we ‘go online’ anymore,” he says.
As users load applications on the internet from multiple devices and work with data in the cloud, “there is no ‘in- side’ or ‘outside’ anymore. No matter where they’re coming from, we have to essentially check and authenticate every user before we provide them access to anything,” he says.
Enabling that remains a challenge for colleges and uni- versities. No matter how large the IT resources of an in- stitution, hackers can overrun that capacity. In February
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