If you haven't already enabled MFA in RM Unify…
Then the best time to do it is now.
Multi-factor authentication for apps in RM Unify, such as Google, Microsoft 365, CC5 etc, adds a critical layer of protection to your establishment's most important and sensitive data. It also helps prevent against bad actors/hackers from gaining access to your school business systems and launching attacks from inside your organisation, in a worst case scenario leading to ransomware.
Education establishments are increasingly being targeted by criminals as they are seen as a soft target, perceived as having weaker cyber security, which is why we've focussed our latest development effort on making it easier to roll out MFA to your users.
What's the challenge with MFA rollout?
Customers, admins, and network managers have told us that rolling out MFA to their users can present a slight challenge where RM Unify Trusted IP addresses are in use. Essentially, if a user who has yet to enrol in RM Unify MFA is in school, and the school network is trusted then, as well as not being challenged for MFA, they are never actually prompted or reminded to setup MFA either. What happens is that they only get prompted outside of school, and outside of the trusted network. So if they then need help or have questions about setting up MFA, they're not in school to ask the IT support, admin or network manager: catch-22!
Also, for increased security and peace of mind, you may only want your users enrolling in MFA when they're actually on a trusted network.
So how does RM Unify help with this?
We've added a couple of logical options to help you tailor the MFA rollout to your particular needs, and you can find them in the MFA section of the Management Console, highlighted below:
Good luck with your rollout, and please do keep sending in the improvement ideas: I read them all 🤗
This is probably also a good opportunity to highlight that the equivalent Trusted IP addresses functionality in Microsoft 365 (aka 'conditional access') can cost hundreds if not thousands of £s extra for the required licensing. Trusted IP addresses and these additional MFA config options, however, are included within your RM Unify Premium and RM SafetyNet subscriptions for no extra cost. We believe that security should not be paywalled.
All the best, Jason
