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Unified Cyber Risk Management for Higher Education

Attack Surface Management - Protecting Your Biggest Vulnerability

FortifyData is designed for higher education institutions seeking a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity risk management—delivering the capabilities of multiple tools in one platform, but at a fraction of the cost. It’s a smarter, more efficient way to reduce risks and optimize your security budget.

Educational institutions are increasingly attractive targets for cybercriminals due to their open, ever-expanding, and distributed networks. This accessibility, expanding attack surfaces from reliance on SaaS and disparate College/Departmental needs, coupled with the wealth of personally identifiable information and research data, makes these institutions vulnerable. This vulnerability, combined with the potential impact of a successful cyberattack, including disruptions to operations and the loss of sensitive data, has led to a surge in ransomware attacks targeting educational institutions.

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"FortifyData has been instrumental in transforming our security from reactive to proactive. The ability to move the needle and watch the needle actually move is really huge."

Hsiawen Hull, Executive Director of Infrastructure and Information Security, College of the Canyons
Read the Higher Ed Case Study

College and Department Cyber Risk Management in One Platform

FortifyData empowers higher education institutions to:

  • Continuously discover and monitor assets across campuses, colleges, and departments
  • Pinpoint and manage risks at both the University and individual College level
  • Assess and manage third-party vendors that serve the whole institution or specific departments
  • Streamline compliance with frameworks like PCI DSS, GLBA, FERPA, and NIST 800-171 while reducing questionnaire fatigue
  • Gain clear security ratings for the overall university and each college for quick, at-a-glance risk visibility

The result: better visibility, stronger compliance, and more informed decisions to protect your institution’s reputation and resources.


Also Read: Understanding GLBA for Colleges and Universities

Higher Education Cyber Risk Management by Colleges and Departments - FortifyData

FortifyData Education Association Participation

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Integrated Threat Intelligence Informs Your Risk Prioritization

The FortifyData platform integrates threat intelligence feeds that are updated hourly, so you get immediate prioritization of risks according to threats against the industry and technologies. Information such as the threat groups and trending threats like malware variants that are targeting the Higher Education industry.

  • Our assessments identify your external assets susceptible to known threat activities such as malware
  • With FortifyData’s internal agents we can identify if threat signatures are present on systems and in files

The threat intelligence feed data is integrated into our risk prioritization, so as threat intelligence changes – related to susceptible assets you have, increase in activity against the industry and threat signatures – the FortifyData platform analysis takes this into account for the threat likelihood calculation and adjusts your risk prioritization accordingly.

We conduct external assessments of third parties for our TPRM program. You would see susceptible external assets being targeted at third parties in the form of higher likelihood ranking,  and you can share that information with them to improve your supplier ecosystem.

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Why Higher Educational Institutions Choose FortifyData

  • Automated asset discovery and continuous monitoring; always looking for new services/assets, always looking for vulnerabilities / threat exposures
  • Prioritized view of risks with recommended remediation steps for identified vulnerabilities, automated risk based on institutional context of data and assets (“What is my highest risk issue at this moment?”)
  • Unified view with consolidation of multiple security tool findings (external, cloud, internal, third parties, GRC) in one platform.
  • We work with a variety of public and private institutions, HBCUs and smaller vocational colleges 
  • FortifyData provides a holistic view of cyber risk across the University, with the ability to drill down into specific colleges, departments or assets 
  • The accuracy of our risk assessment findings is based on continuous, direct, assessments of the Higher Educational environment’s assets, services and processes that provide an up-to-date view of cyber risk  
  • Monitor cyber risk management progress compared to other higher educational institutions 
Read our Higher Ed Datasheet

Solutions for Higher Education Institutions

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Attack Surface Management and Risk-based Vulnerability Management 

Starting with asset discovery and inventory, our Attack Surface Management (ASM) identifies your educational institution’s IT assets as an attacker will. FortifyData assesses all ports and services of a University’s external and internal attack surface and identifies the same vulnerabilities an attacker would. Our prioritization capabilities help you cut through the noise and get a view of the vulnerabilities with the most impact that actually matters; you can view this across the entire University or by specific College or department. You get a prioritized risk approach that considers context through asset classification, threat likelihood, and business impact, so you know where to focus time and resources on the most critical vulnerabilities to your organization. 

images of common cyber compliance in higher education

Managing Compliance, Improving Reporting and Communication 

FortifyData’s automated platform helps to streamline aspects of the compliance monitoring and reporting activities. The platform helps an educational institution to meet certain requirements of various compliance frameworks for cyber risk management, assessments, vulnerability management and third-party risk management.  

Additionally, reporting from the FortifyData platform provides easy to understand reports with underlying detail to better report and communicate compliance management with stakeholders.  

Higher Education Third-Party Cyber Risk Management - FortifyData

Third-Party Cyber Risk Management 

Effectively evaluate a vendor and the specific service or product a vendor provides.

Gain visibility into third-party cyber risks with continuous assessments of their external assets. We integrate our technology assessment findings to our embedded standard compliance or custom questionnaires to perform auto-validation that saves time in reviewing responses. Keep up to date on the compliance of your suppliers with your policies, and quickly identify vendors that do not comply. Get the full picture of external vulnerabilities at your third parties with our auto-validated questionnaires that leverage the live assessment data conducted on their environment. This provides you with the answers you need more quickly (in the time to run an assessment) than a manual questionnaire process. Create custom questionnaires that are specific to each vendor. Easily assign tasks and collaborate and track questionnaires with our task management capabilities.

Speed up vendor evaluations by spending less time reviewing questionnaires with FortifyData’s Questionnaire Exchange. Participants instantly access shared validated cyber risk assessments and questionnaires, allowing you to quickly make risk based decisions.

Related Resources

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GLBA Compliance for Higher Education: Meeting the Safeguards Rule

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