Higher education institutions operate some of the most complex identity environments of any industry. Universities often struggle to balance open access for learning and research with strong security controls to protect students, faculty, and sensitive institutional data. This contrast creates unique identity security and management challenges that require specialized strategies and tools.
A Highly Complex Identity Ecosystem
Unlike corporate businesses, the ecosystem that is common at universities requires them to manage a variable and highly diverse population of users. Churn is a constant challenge, with students, faculty, alumni, researchers, contractors, and affiliate colleges and labs, and other contributors enrolling, changing roles or status, tracks or departments, and leaving frequently.
This dynamic ecosystem results in an identity lifecycle that is far more fluid than most corporate environments. “Joiners”, or new identities, are created continuously, while “movers and leavers” should be deactivated, modified, or removed quickly. This process is often disjointed, with delays resulting from resource constraints and other priorities taking precedence.
To add to the complexities of the identities involved, the actual identity management infrastructure can be diverse and often hybrid, built on both on-premises Active Directory and cloud-based identity platforms like Microsoft Entra ID. These systems work together to provide access to email, collaboration tools, research systems, lab environments, and academic applications. Unfortunately, they also introduce complexity and risk when not managed cohesively.
This complex environment is often targeted by threat actors who yearn to breach the organization and gain:
- Access to sensitive research data
- Compromise student and faculty records
- Escalate privileges
- Move laterally across systems
- Maintain persistent access over long periods
Protecting hybrid AD in Higher Ed
Higher ed IAM expert Rob Kraczek breaks down practical strategies to eliminate orphaned accounts, secure service accounts, and maintain compliance without slowing departments down.
- Why it matters: Higher education faces elevated identity risk due to high user turnover, decentralized administration, and complex AD/Entra ID environments.
- What you’ll learn: How Active Roles reduces attack paths by automating lifecycle management, enforcing least privilege with full auditing, and governing hybrid identities at scale.
Watch the webinar: Protecting hybrid AD in Higher Education.
Hybrid Identity Environments Create Governance Gaps
Higher education institutions rarely eliminate legacy systems. Instead, they accumulate layers of identity infrastructure over time, adding the new to the old. On-premises Microsoft Active Directory continues to serve as the foundational identity repository to support access to campus workstations and lab computers, file servers and research systems, academic applications and internal administrative platforms.
Meanwhile, Entra ID enables access to modern cloud services such as Microsoft 365 applications, email and collaboration tools, learning management systems (LMS), and cloud storage and research platforms.
These systems often operate in parallel, resulting in inconsistencies between environments. For example, disabling a user account in Active Directory may not automatically disable their corresponding Entra ID account. This disconnect creates dangerous security gaps and vulnerabilities.
While the variability of the higher education environment is unique, some of its challenges are common to all hybrid identity environments.
High Identity Turnover Increases Risk Exposure
Identity churn in higher education is constant and predictable. Every semester brings changes related to the identities identified above. This continuous turnover creates significant challenges in identity provisioning and deprovisioning.
When identity lifecycle processes are manual or fragmented, institutions often accumulate:
- Orphaned accounts with no active owner
- Disabled AD accounts that still have active Entra ID access
- Excessive group memberships carried over from prior roles or semesters
- Forgotten privileged accounts with elevated permissions
Each of these represents a potential attack vector. Over time, these unmanaged identities create a sprawling attack surface that becomes increasingly difficult to monitor or protect.
Decentralized IT Models Increase Administrative Complexity
Universities are inherently decentralized. Individual colleges, departments, and labs often maintain their own IT staff and infrastructure.
While this autonomy enables academic flexibility, it introduces significant governance challenges. IT administrators across different departments may:
- Create accounts using inconsistent naming conventions
- Assign permissions based on local needs without centralized oversight
- Maintain separate Active Directory domains or Entra ID and Microsoft 365 tenants
- Manage identity tasks manually using scripts or native tools
This decentralized approach makes it difficult to maintain consistent security controls and visibility across the institution, as each domain and tenant could be implementing and enforcing different policies to varying degrees. Without centralized identity governance, universities may not have a complete view of what critical systems an identity (Both human and non-human) can access, and which accounts are privileged. Over time, it becomes difficult to determine whether privileges align with current roles or whether standing accounts should be deactivated. This lack of visibility delays breach detection and increases institutional risk.
Credential-Based Attacks Are the Most Common Entry Point
Credential compromise remains one of the most effective attack methods against higher education institutions.
Attackers frequently use phishing or MFA fatigue attacks to gain access to student or staff accounts. Once inside, they can exploit excessive permissions, forgotten group memberships, or disconnected identity systems to escalate privileges and move laterally across the environment. These types of attacks can be very harmful in higher education because the environment often contains intellectual property and sensitive data.
Manual Identity Management Limits Scalability and Security
Many universities still rely on manual processes for identity management tasks to create, modify, or deactivate accounts and privileges. These manual processes can overwhelm already resource-constrained IT teams. This introduces the risk of human error, inconsistent policies and policy enforcement across the ecosystem, and a lack of audit trails. The outcome includes inaccurate privileges, standing privileges, and other risks that cybercriminals can exploit. Manual identity security and management efforts do not scale easily or effectively.
Compliance and Audit Requirements Add Additional Pressure
Higher education institutions must comply with regulatory frameworks such as FERPA, which governs the protection of student data. These regulations require institutions to demonstrate:
- Controlled access to sensitive data
- Auditability of identity and access changes
- Timely removal of access when no longer needed
- Enforcement of least privilege access models
Without centralized identity governance, producing audit evidence becomes time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult. The complexity and lack of consistency across a hybrid environment can increase the risk of audit findings and regulatory penalties.
Addressing the Challenge Requires a Unified Identity Environment and Strategy
To reduce risk and improve operational efficiency, universities and other institutions of higher learning must move toward unified identity models that provide:
- Centralized visibility across hybrid identity environments
- Automated provisioning and deprovisioning
- Consistent enforcement of least privilege access
- Comprehensive audit trails
- Reduction of orphaned and excessive accounts
- Standardized workflows across departments
Automation, centralized management, and governance controls help institutions close the security gaps created by hybrid infrastructure, decentralized IT, and high identity turnover.
About the Author: Robert has more than three decades of security experience, with a specialization in Identity security. His responsibilities include working with customers to develop a strategy to solve their security challenges as well as helping set the future direction of the One Identity portfolio. Over the years, Robert has implemented solutions and advised customers in all major industries as well as local, state and federal governments.
Robert Kraczek — Global strategist One Identity https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5JiATK0CX28XvUYsGNCfqyJFBaaJTfyZoDAmwKudjIGMVKlYV4JzY3G7MhIgFVgSMkXqAdLgzr_KF0WmBDWKJWolmNt_sWmtf4fAg9IoqEfidh3kH8onkdsjZrqIzLcJ2REhOQJSc9HugN8Zyf4q6unbDj3PxesyhpUjIX9_DAS1uq59ZgUn7upKAwq8/s1600/Robert.png
