Dean Wiech

Dean Wiech is managing director of Tools4ever, a global provider of identity and access management solutions. Dean has worked with businesses, educational entities and municipalities for more than 20 years, helping them identify solutions that make their businesses and operations more secure, efficient and easier to manage. He is responsible for Tools4ever's U.S. operations and has written dozens of articles about identity and access management, security, IT audits, strategy, BYOD, the cloud and managing IT solutions for small businesses to enterprise systems.

Articles by Dean Wiech

• Changing the way we think about education security

  Monday, January 09, 2017

  When we think of education technology, we typically think of its use within a classroom environment. When we think of education security, the physical safety of the students and staff are first to mind. How do the two concepts merge into ensuring the identity and data security for students and staff within educational and technological environments?

• Allow your district’s IT department to have a relaxing summer: Automate access management

  Friday, June 17, 2016

  As summer is upon us, not all school districts employees are looking forward to relaxing for a few months. System administrators often need to prepare during the off-student months for the new school year by making all the appropriate changes to their network, including upgrading software and changing their systems. As is often the case, hundreds of students need to be added to the roles and have accounts created for them, while hundreds more move up to different grade levels, and still hundreds more graduate out of the system.

• Automating account access solves many schools’ IT problems

  Thursday, February 04, 2016

  ​Administrative technology in education is constantly evolving and changing. These improvements, as in any industry, are meant to better meet the needs of users. The difference in education is much of the technology employed throughout the organization is used by teachers and students who are engaged in the learning process, unlike in other sectors where the technology is designed to enhance business solutions or meant to deliver a sale.

• The rise of access management in education

  Thursday, September 17, 2015

  The often-undiscussed importance that administrative technology has on school districts might be tantamount to suggesting that the only use for technology in a school district is in its classroom. There are far-reaching solutions that provide overwhelming benefits to the classroom, even if these technologies are not used to deliver homework to mobile devices or tally the marks of a classroom's population.

• A world without identity and access management

  Monday, June 29, 2015

  It seems that every week the news is reporting on yet another story of hackers accessing sensitive information, compromising credit card systems or bringing websites to a crawl. One thing you seldom, if ever, read about is employees accessing information on the company's network they really should not be able to access.

• In healthcare, managing access rights is a necessary mandate

  Monday, December 08, 2014

  ​Access to critical data is paramount criteria for business success. Physicians and nurses need access to patients' records to insure proper delivery of care, and encumbering employees and internal stakeholders by placing too many restrictions or complicated access methodologies upon internal systems can have catastrophic consequences.

• Community colleges see IT issues similar to larger universities

  Thursday, July 24, 2014

  Just like large public and private universities, community colleges also deal with account and password management issues. They might be on a smaller scale, but these problems interfere with productivity and efficiency just as much as those faced by "larger" entities.