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08/06/2026 4:36 pm
TL;DR: Higher education saw 1,075 incidents and 851 confirmed breaches involving authenticated data in 2024, with phishing, stolen credentials, and ransomware leading the attack mix, according to Verizon’s 2025 DBIR. Static access controls and manual attestation are no longer enough for campus environments that have become more distributed and more exposed.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Bravura Security: access management and governance for higher education modernization
By the numbers:
- The education sector experienced 1,075 incidents and 851 confirmed breaches involving the disclosure of authenticated data in 2024.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should higher education teams reduce credential-based breaches across campus systems?
A: They should focus on phishing-resistant authentication, tighter conditional access, and rapid removal of standing privilege.
Q: Why do IAM and PAM need to be managed together in universities?
A: IAM defines who should have access, while PAM limits what elevated access can do and for how long.
Q: What breaks when access reviews are still done manually?
A: Manual access reviews become stale when permissions change faster than the review cycle.
Practitioner guidance
- Prioritise phishing-resistant authentication for high-risk campus accounts Start with administrative, finance, research, and IT accounts that can unlock privileged systems or sensitive records.
- Map and reduce standing privilege in faculty, staff, and vendor roles Inventory admin entitlements, database access, and elevated cloud permissions, then remove continuous privilege where task-scoped access will work.
- Replace spreadsheet attestation with event-driven recertification Trigger reviews on mover, leaver, contract-end, and role-change events instead of waiting for quarterly cycles.
What's in the full article
Bravura Security's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Practical guidance on how higher education teams can phase IAM modernization across existing campus systems.
- Discussion of HECVAT and vendor-risk evaluation in the context of university procurement.
- How automation changes the access review and attestation workflow for auditors and IT teams.
- A broader explanation of how the vendor positions its access management and governance solution for education environments.
👉 Read Bravura Security's access management guidance for higher education modernization →
Higher education access controls: are IAM and PAM keeping pace?
Explore further
08/06/2026 6:19 pm
Higher education IAM is still being treated as an account-management problem when it is really an identity control-plane problem. The article shows that campuses are trying to secure modernization with tools, but the underlying issue is governance: access, privilege, and review are too often handled as separate chores. Once systems span cloud, remote users, vendors, and research environments, the control plane becomes the real target. Practitioners should stop thinking about login administration in isolation and start treating identity governance as the security architecture for the campus.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts, according to the 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
- Only 19.6% of security professionals express strong confidence in their organisation's ability to securely manage non-human workload identities, a confidence gap that mirrors the governance weaknesses seen in many identity programmes.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can universities tell whether Zero Trust is actually improving identity security?
A: They should look for fewer accounts with persistent privilege, faster removal of stale access, and tighter linkage between identity state and network enforcement. If zero trust is only changing remote access tools but not entitlement hygiene, the programme is cosmetic rather than effective.
👉 Read our full editorial: Higher education IAM and PAM are lagging modern campus risk
