Educause Horizon Report: Sustainability Pressures Lead to Increased Cybersecurity Risks

• By Rhea Kelly
• 10/07/24

Educause recently released the 2024 Cybersecurity and Privacy Edition of its Horizon Report series, forecasting key trends, technologies, and practices shaping the future of cybersecurity and privacy in higher education. The report pulls together insights from 39 expert panelists from around the globe, who ranked trends across five categories: Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political.

The technological trends identified in the report this year should come as no surprise to anyone:

• Cybersecurity and privacy risks and threats are growing.
• Cyber attacks are increasingly sophisticated.
• Technology is constantly and rapidly changing.

More notable, though, is the way environmental trends are impacting cybersecurity. For example: "New risks are … being introduced as higher education institutions are facing growing pressure to be sustainable and are continuing to integrate sustainable technologies, which tend to expand the cyber attack surface," the report pointed out. In addition, "concerns over the environmental impact of AI are increasing, posing a potential challenge for cybersecurity teams who rely on AI-driven security tools," the report said. In other words, sustainability efforts are both increasing cybersecurity risk and restricting cybersecurity teams' ability to combat threats.

"Teams relying on AI-driven cybersecurity measures will not only need to be mindful of the carbon emissions produced by them but will also need to find ways to reduce these emissions," the report advised. "Cybersecurity and privacy teams can look for ways to make their AI consumption more environmentally friendly, for example by investing in AI-powered cybersecurity solutions that either don't require large language models (LLMs) at all or rely on existing ones (rather than creating new ones), incorporating fine-tuning methods (improving model efficiency), and using low-powered devices to run models."

The full list of trends identified by the report is:

Social:

• Privacy concerns are growing.
• Cyber attacks that have physical-world consequences are on the rise.
• Cyber attacks targeting students are increasing.

Technological:

• Cybersecurity and privacy risks and threats are growing.
• Cyber attacks are increasingly sophisticated.
• Technology is constantly and rapidly changing.

Economic:

• Institutions continue to face financial constraints.
• Gaps in the workforce continue to impact institutions.
• AI is increasingly transforming how people work.

Environmental:

• Institutions continue to integrate sustainable technologies.
• Pressure is growing for institutions to be sustainable.
• Concerns over the environmental impact of AI are increasing.

Political:

• The state and federal regulatory landscapes continue to change.
• Politically motivated attacks are on the rise.
• Politics is influencing higher education programs and curricula.

The full report is available here on the Educause site.