One conversation keeps coming up when I speak with leaders across higher education: How do you strengthen cyber risk oversight when resources are already stretched thin?
The answer for many institutions isn't hiring larger teams or adding more point solutions. It's gaining a clearer, more connected view of risk. Across higher education, colleges and universities are moving away from fragmented processes and toward centralized, AI-powered GRC platforms that help them identify risks earlier, improve oversight and make better use of limited resources.
Read on to learn how higher education leaders are modernizing their approach to cyber risk and IT compliance.
Think about everything a college or university manages each day: financial aid, donor and alumni relationships, campus healthcare, payroll, research grants and, of course, teaching and learning running on interconnected systems that handle sensitive information regularly.
Higher ed IT, risk and compliance teams are expected to have visibility into all of it while working through a patchwork of obligations such as GLBA Safeguard Rule requirements evaluated through the Department of Education's annual audit guide, accreditor expectations, cyber insurance underwriting, and board reporting. Having small teams and not the right resources make tracking those requirements challenging. When a gap becomes apparent, it’s usually because tracking was done in a spreadsheet and not part of documented process. Cybersecurity remains a significant risk facing U.S. higher education institutions as they are increasingly becoming more digital.
“None of us can make an excuse anymore about a lack of early indicators,” Diligent’s General Manager of Risk and Audit, Scott Bridgen, offers a valuable reminder. “The ability to see them has never been more accessible, and those indicators can be the difference between an incident, with all of its repercussions, and proactive risk management.”
There’s just one big problem impeding such comprehensive visibility and proactive oversight: Traditional monitoring and reporting practices, specifically fragmented systems and manual processes.
Higher education institutions already operate across a complex network of colleges, schools, research centers and administrative functions. These groups often manage risk independently, using different systems and, in some cases, entirely different definitions of what constitutes risk.
This fragmentation too often results in blind spots and duplicated efforts. Inconsistencies compromise data quality, governance and ownership. Next steps stall, and red flags fall through the cracks.
Critically, institutional leadership doesn’t get a consolidated look at these red flags unless someone manually builds such a big-picture view.
Manual processes not only delay threat reporting and response, they drain time from already short-staffed higher ed risk teams. Staff spend countless hours retrieving data by hand, validating information through phone calls and emails, maintaining spreadsheets and preparing reports for boards and audit committees.
Productivity and strategy both suffer.
When teams are stretched thin, they spend their time on whatever issue speaks loudest: The incident that just happened, the finding that just landed, the audit that's due next week. There's no bandwidth left for forward-looking identification of threats and risks.
It’s little wonder that colleges and universities have been seeking a more unified and efficient way to manage risk across departments, protect sensitive data and demonstrate compliance.
Cyber risk has been treated as a part of enterprise risk in Higher Ed for years. Where many institutions are still playing catch-up is operationally. Internal audit often cannot see the current state of the risk register, so audit plans may get built around stale of incomplete risk information instead of what ERM is actually tracking in real time.
The next step is closing that visibility gap integrating audit, risk and compliance workflows into a single GRC solution. Each line is keeping their own workflows and reporting lines, safeguarding access but pulling from the same underlying risk and control data powered by automation, advanced analytics and AI.
Moving from dozens of disconnected spreadsheets to a consolidated system of record gives leadership one current view of risk instead of reconciling conflicting versions from finance, IT, or compliance. However, it does not remove the underlying necessary work: someone still has to assess risks, test controls, and following through on audit findings and recommendations, but it removes the time lost on chasing down information and reduces the blind spots from dealing with three different teams tracking the same risks in three different ways.
That consolidation comes with its own requirement: Access controls have to be deliberate. Audit findings, HR-related risk items, and sensitive compliance data still need to stay restricted to the people with a legitimate need to know. Role-based permissions are what makes a shared system of record usable across functions like audit that needs to stay independent from the rest, not an afterthought bolted on later.
Workflow integration ties risks to controls, audit findings, and remediation tracking, so when something is flagged such as a GLBA Safeguards Rule gap or an unremediated audit finding, it has a named owner and a visible deadline, instead of sitting in an email threat or being hidden in somebody's spreadsheet until the next audit cycle.
AI and advanced analytics equip teams with even more insight. Here’s an example, straight from one of our customers. The team loaded in standard data from various systems for analysis. Then they used Diligent’s anomaly-finding capabilities to identify trends. This enabled them to flag potential issues before they became incidents.
With such insights, an IT, compliance or governance leader is able to weave a web of understanding around their organization’s true risk picture and risk posture.
If you're responsible for cyber, risk, IT or compliance in higher education, the question is no longer whether you need better visibility into risk, but how quickly you can achieve it.
Diligent’s GRC platform offers the visibility, readiness, responsiveness and accountability you need for the challenges you face today:
Imagine more efficient, proactive management of cyber risk and IT compliance in your college or university.
