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How Universities and Colleges Can Stay Secure With a Limited IT Budget and Small Team

As we continue talking with higher educational institutions, a similar theme among all discussions is the challenging reality of having a small IT/security team and limited budget. Many are looking for ways to improve their status quo as they realize that what kept them ‘secure’ to this point will most likely not keep them secure in the future.  More so than ever, higher education must keep up with emerging cyber security threats with smaller teams and more limited budget.  

However, even with limited resources, proactive measures can significantly improve your cybersecurity posture. This article explores practical strategies for higher education IT and security leaders to navigate the cybersecurity landscape with a limited budget and small team. 

Prioritize ruthlessly: 

  • Consolidate and simplify: Evaluate your current security tools. Can you eliminate redundancies and consolidate functionalities into a single platform? This can save costs, reduce your team’s time managing multiple solutions with disparate data outputs, and streamline workflows for your team. 
    • We hear that a “single pane of glass” is what more and more Higher Education leaders are seeking. Immediately understand attack surface, vulnerability prioritization, cyber risk trends and progress, integrate data sources, third-party risk – all in one.  This saves time and money. 
  • Conduct a security risk assessment: Identify your institution’s most critical assets and data as part of the business impact analysis (BIA) of the risk assessment. Focus your limited resources on protecting those high-value targets. 
    • Solutions that automate assessments (see point below) and can highlight the most critical priorities on your most critical assets will return time to smaller team sizes to focus on other strategic projects. 

Embrace Automation: 

  • Automate vulnerability management and prioritization: Free your team from tedious manual and repetitive processes, which cost time and money. Automated solutions can continuously scan your network (attack surface) often identifying unknown assets, identify vulnerabilities, enrich your asset findings with cyber threat intelligence and prioritize them – considering operational criticality for your institution – for patching and remediation. 
    • For some, there comes a trade-off discussion here, should I forego a complimentary but vague and infrequent vulnerability report provided by an ISAC or other industry consortium? If it’s automated and considers your asset classification and prioritization, it may still be viable. Otherwise, you may be at the mercy of implementing remediations against vulnerabilities that are weeks or months old. 
  • Security awareness training automation: Utilize online training platforms to deliver consistent and scalable security awareness training to faculty, staff, and students, such as phishing and to communicate security hygiene best practices. 
    • This helps to align your workforce and students to the goals of the University or College where security is a program where all participation is needed and builds a security-awareness culture. 

While budget limitations are real and dynamic (thanks VMware price increases), a successful cyberattack can have devastating consequences, disrupting operations, compromising sensitive data, and damaging your institution’s reputation. By prioritizing strategically, embracing automation, and fostering a security-conscious culture, higher education IT and security leaders can significantly improve their institution’s cybersecurity posture, even with limited resources. 

FortifyData is helping Colleges and Universities with small teams to automate their vulnerability and vendor risk management processes in a consolidated platform. Learn how we can help you, and read how our Higher Education clients are automating attack surface management, meeting GLBA Safeguards Rule compliance and hear their thoughts on our platform. 

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