Dive Brief:
- Postsecondary institutions are often targets of cyber attacks because campuses house large amounts of sensitive financial and personal data. Further, institutions typically maintain an open-access culture and lack centralized information control, making them particularly susceptible to data breaches, a report from Deloitte finds.
- Despite their susceptibility, the report's researchers found that institutions remain behind on security for three reasons: The pathway to presidency is primarily through academia, which doesn't offer exposure to IT expertise; demands on the president are wide-ranging and leave little time for attention on technically complicated cyber issues; and chief information officers are often not part of the president's cabinet, with only 56% of institutions surveyed in a 2016 EDUCAUSE study reporting CIOs or equivalents having this role.
- The report recommends institutions try to elevate the role of CIOs and IT professionals, so they can more effectively offer advice to the president, and that these leaders work to make technical jargon more understandable. This is critical, because as the report shows, risks of poor cybersecurity planning can result in serious financial costs, impacts on day-to-day operations functioning and reputation damage with consumers, corporate partners and government groups.
Dive Insight:
As college campuses become increasingly dependent on the use of digital technology, it is critical that there is collaboration between institutions' IT departments and other executive administrative groups, especially because studies show the average cost of a data breach can be as much as $260 per record. As Scott Midkiff, CIO at Virginia Tech, told Education Dive, the way institutions can get ahead of this is by focusing bringing the CIO into conversations where any serious decisions are being made on technology or IT infrastructure investments.
"The IT organization [needs to] understands what the functional needs are, what the academic needs are, what the research needs are, and that the functional units understand what some of the constraints of the opportunity some of the IT environment is that will help distinguish between what's going to be a successful product and what's going to be perhaps a failure," said Midkiff.
The need for institutions to incorporate, at the very least, the CIO into the president's cabinet is reflected in the fact the CIO position is increasingly being recognized as a potential pathway to presidency position. While the role is still overwhelmingly based on academic transitions, CIOs have taken on more business and strategic planning responsibilities that — along with possessing the necessary expertise in digital environments — could make them more suitable for leadership on the 21st century campus dominated by online education, investments in new virtual tools and tech-savvy students.