Experts mull over significance of cloud security oversight in higher education

EdTech Magazine reports that as universities quickly migrate to cloud-based infrastructure, technologies such as cloud access security, cloud security monitoring, and cloud security posture management can help reduce risk, restore visibility, and strengthen governance throughout sophisticated higher education IT environments. With critical services, institutional data, and user identities now spanning countless cloud and SaaS platforms, the conventional campus perimeter has disappeared.

“In higher education, that creates a much broader and more fluid attack surface, where risk comes not just from campus systems but from misconfigured cloud storage, compromised identities, unmanaged third-party apps and inconsistent security controls across distributed environments,” said SANS Technology Institute President Ed Skoudis.

Rich Campana, Palo Alto Networks’ senior vice president for network security, emphasized the significance of security that can regularly perform user verification and activity monitoring across cloud services, campus infrastructure, and Saas platforms.

“We are no longer defending a ‘castle with a moat,'” he said. “We are defending a distributed ecosystem where the identity of the user and the integrity of the application are the only true perimeters left.”

Campana also advised “to focus on continuous discovery and risk-based management of applications” as it is an effective security strategy.

Meanwhile, Splunk Chief Cybersecurity Advisor Paul Kurtz noted that “improving cloud visibility in higher education is less about tightening the screws and more about instrumenting what already exists, so security can keep pace with teaching and research, not slow it.”

Cloud security remains a challenge for universities because of research data.

“Strong visibility into where data lives, how it moves and who can reach it is what turns that complexity into something governable,” he added.