Strengthen your university's cybersecurity and ensure secure access to sensitive academic and administrative data with a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution like KeeperPAM®.
Of higher education institutions are more likely to pay above the initial ransom demand.
Was the average ransom paid by higher education institutions in 2024, making it the third highest of any sector.
Year-over-year increase in the number of weekly attacks in the education sector in 2024.
Many universities operate decentralized IT systems, where individual departments and research groups manage their own infrastructure, often leading to inconsistent security policies and fragmented oversight.
Universities experience a constant turnover of students, researchers and faculty members, leading to a high volume of user provisioning and deprovisioning requests. Without an automated process, IT teams can become overwhelmed which can increase the risk of security lapses.
Faculty, researchers and students often require access to systems outside regular business hours, which can make it challenging for security teams to differentiate legitimate access from potential threats.
As users enter and leave the institution or shift between roles and responsibilities, maintaining accurate and up-to-date access permissions becomes increasingly complex. Without effective access management tools in place, universities risk granting improper access to sensitive systems or data, potentially exposing critical information to unauthorized users.
Universities manage vast amounts of sensitive data, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), financial records, academic records and proprietary research. Meeting compliance requirements such as FERPA, HIPAA, PCI DSS and NIST 800-53 requires strict control over privileged access.
In academic research settings, collaboration between universities, government agencies and private organizations often requires granting privileged access to critical systems. While necessary for sharing resources and data, this increases the risk of unauthorized access, which can lead to data breaches.
KeeperPAM ensures security across your entire institution while allowing departments to maintain autonomy over their systems. With Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), universities can enforce security policies without interfering with departmental workflows. Additionally, federated authentication and Single Sign-On (SSO) integration enable departments to retain their preferred identity management solutions, such as Azure AD, Okta and Google Workspace, to ensure centralized security oversight. Because many universities operate across multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments, KeeperPAM also enforces zero-trust access policies to ensure that privileged accounts are secured across all infrastructure.
KeeperPAM simplifies user lifecycle management by integrating with SCIM and Identity Providers (IdPs), so user accounts are automatically provisioned and deprovisioned based on enrollment or employment status. For students and faculty working on time-sensitive projects, Just-In-Time (JIT) access allows users to request temporary privileges, which are automatically revoked once their work is completed. To further reduce security risks, KeeperPAM automates password rotation. This ensures that former students or staff cannot retain access to critical systems after leaving the university.
KeeperPAM enforces granular access controls that ensure users receive only the permissions they need and only when they need them. Role-based policies and session-based credentials prevent unnecessary standing privileges while allowing faculty, researchers and staff to seamlessly access critical systems. This approach minimizes security risks without disrupting academic operations or delaying important work.
KeeperPAM ensures all privileged access is logged, monitored and auditable, simplifying compliance. Detailed audit logs and session recordings provide full visibility into who accessed what data and when, helping IT and compliance teams respond to potential security incidents quickly. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) can be enforced across all systems, even those that do not natively support it. Additionally, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) controls help prevent unauthorized copying, downloading or sharing of sensitive academic and research information. Integration with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms allows universities to automate compliance monitoring, detect anomalies in privileged access and generate detailed audit reports.
KeeperPAM enables secure, streamlined access without sacrificing security. With granular role-based and time-limited access, researchers can request temporary access to databases, High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters and shared computing environments while ensuring that credentials are never exposed. KeeperPAM also provides secure tunneling, which allows researchers to access sensitive research systems without requiring Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or exposing privileged credentials.
"We're able to go in and audit the security of the accounts and the password security, and make sure that everybody has their multi-factor set up. There's a lot of nice features in Keeper that give us the ability to lock everything down."
Whinston Antion
Assistant Director of Identity & Access Management, West Virginia University
"We set expectations with users that they'd have a secure and very easy way to share passwords; in other words, a simple solution that didn't get in their way but was very effective. That's what Keeper delivers."
Josh Zojonc
Lead Infrastructure Engineer, Oregon State University
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