In October 2023, the British Library discovered it’d been compromised. Ransomware had spread through its systems. Within hours, the decision was made to take everything offline. The reading rooms stayed open, but researchers arriving with laptops found themselves working from memory or heading home. The digital catalogue, the online collections, the systems that held generations of accumulated knowledge were gone.
It took four months to start the infrastructure rebuild required to restore basic services.
What made the British Library an attractive target? User data: researchers, members and academics whose details could be sold or ransomed. Digital collections and rare materials that had been catalogued over decades. Connections to wider academic and research networks. And most importantly, operational leverage. The attackers knew the Library couldn’t simply stay offline indefinitely. Institutions that depend on access are prime targets for ransomware.
Universities hold all of this, and more.
Student data containing financial information, medical records, immigration status for international students… Research data from commercially sensitive collaborations, such as pharmaceutical trials and engineering designs, worth millions on the right market. Alumni databases full of wealthy donors and high-profile individuals. Access to government research bodies, international academic networks and industry partnerships.
But universities face a vulnerability the British Library doesn’t. Four months offline was catastrophic for the Library. Yet it exists to preserve and provide access, not to operate on fixed academic calendars with immovable deadlines. A university offline from October to February, the same period the Library was down, would face a very different outcome. That timeframe covers admissions season, teaching terms, assessment periods and research milestones. Students comparing institutions make decisions within weeks, not months. The question isn’t whether operations would resume; they would. It’s what happens to recruitment, to research continuity, to partnerships that depend on reliability during the period when systems are down and competitors remain accessible.
The British Library could go dark and come back. A university that loses access to its systems mid-academic year faces something closer to existential threat.
Preventable cyber attacks
This isn’t hypothetical. According to the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024, more than nine in 10 UK universities reported at least one cyber incident or data breach in a 12-month period. The National Cyber Security Centre’s 2023 report found that many incidents in the education sector stemmed from poor cyber hygiene: weak access controls, unpatched systems and misconfigured cloud environments. These were not sophisticated nation-state attacks. They were preventable failures. Near misses that, this time, didn’t result in catastrophe. The fact that valuable data wasn’t stolen doesn’t mean the vulnerability disappeared. It means most got lucky.
The pattern extends well beyond higher education. This spring, Marks & Spencer, a company that has spent 140 years building one of Britain’s most trusted retail brands, lost control of its systems for six weeks. The breach reportedly began with credential compromise linked to a social-engineering attack. By the time M&S contained the incident, analysts were estimating a profit impact of up to £300m, without including market valuation or customer confidence sentiment.
M&S will recover. The brand carries enough equity to withstand this. But the incident demonstrated something uncomfortable: that resource advantage and security investment provide insulation, not immunity. The company had many attributes universities lack in cybersecurity, including scale, budget and expertise. Yet, despite all this, the vulnerability existed anyway. The irony is that the institutions most trusted to safeguard knowledge are often among the least equipped to protect it. Corporate boards have spent the past decade elevating cybersecurity to a strategic risk, with many large companies now appointing CISOs who report directly to the CEO or board. In higher education, that shift has been slower. EDUCAUSE research indicates in most universities, security leadership still reports within IT rather than into executive management, a structural gap that leaves cybersecurity treated as a technical issue rather than an institutional one.
This isn’t only about reporting lines. It reflects a deeper structural difference. Research from EDUCAUSE and Jisc paints a consistent picture: the technology base itself reflects different histories. Universities were early internet adopters, pioneering work that now presents complications. Many still operate systems from those foundational years, infrastructure that was designed for academic collaboration rather than threat resistance.
The scale of the challenge is clear. A 2024 KPMG report on UK higher education found only 12% of decision-makers believe their institution’s modernisation efforts are completely successful. The reasons are concrete: 58% cite a lack of technology-specific skills or knowledge, 42% point to the absence of a clear technology strategy and 58% identify complex legacy infrastructure as a significant obstacle.
The picture that emerges is of institutions straining under technical debt and uneven capability. Without strong foundations in cloud governance, attempts to modernise systems risk compounding that complexity rather than resolving it. The picture that emerges is of institutions straining under technical debt and uneven capability. Without strong foundations in cloud governance, even well-intentioned transformation efforts risk compounding that complexity.
Cloud maturity, not complexity
This is where cloud maturity becomes relevant, not as jargon, but as the set of disciplines that keep complexity under control. It means securing the fundamentals: identity management, access controls and data classification. Making performance predictable, so systems behave consistently under pressure. Building resilience, so when failures happen, recovery is measured in hours with clear procedures, not weeks of manual reconstruction by overstretched teams trying to piece together undocumented dependencies. Governing change, so innovation doesn’t become a new route to vulnerability. As universities begin to deploy AI in teaching and administration, these same controls will determine whether systems become smarter or simply faster at making mistakes.
Cost of reputational damage
The consequences of failure, when they come, aren’t abstract. Research by Tribal Group on student decision-making found two-thirds would be less likely to apply to a university with a known poor data-security record.
Lincoln College in Illinois, 157 years old and home to 600 students, became the first American institution to close partly due to a ransomware attack, according to reports in 2022. The December 2021 attack left systems for recruitment, retention and fundraising inoperable for three months. The college, already financially strained from the pandemic, lost its ability to process applications and communicate with prospective students during the critical enrolment window. When systems returned in March, administrators had no reliable projection of autumn enrolment numbers. Without those forecasts, they couldn’t secure financing, plan staffing or make the budget decisions necessary to continue operating. The college announced permanent closure in May 2022.
Reputation doesn’t collapse overnight. It seeps. A single breach ripples through academic networks, funding circles and alumni associations. The institutional damage persists after systems are restored, playing out in thousands of individual choices about where to study, where to work and where to collaborate.
Research examining cyberattack patterns suggests attackers choose valuable targets systematically. Universities with larger research portfolios and sensitive collaborations register as priorities. The openness required for academic work, from decentralised IT and department-level network decisions to visiting researchers requiring access, creates exposure that doesn’t exist where security requirements can be centrally imposed.
For universities, the stakes are higher still. Their value is almost entirely intangible. They don’t manufacture products or trade assets. What they offer is confidence: in their authority over knowledge, ability to govern what they hold and judgement about what matters. That confidence accumulates over decades. Once damaged, it doesn’t return quickly.
A university’s name is its asset. Unlike commercial organisations that can pivot to new markets or deploy capital towards perception management, universities are constrained by what they are. Resources diverted to crisis communications are resources not funding scholarships or research. The core offering doesn’t change. When the name becomes associated with governance failure, the damage persists across every decision that depends on confidence – from student choices, to research partnerships and funding allocations – long after the technical crisis has been resolved.
Cloud migration vs maturity
Cloud migration solved one set of problems and created another. Universities gained scale and flexibility. But they also gained complexity – more connections, more vendors, more surface area for risk. The hyperscalers provided platforms. Migration partners moved the workloads. But maturity? That was assumed to happen by itself.
But it doesn’t. Consider what it means to move into a new building with modern locks, CCTV coverage and security-grade doors, but not know who holds the keys or who can access the surveillance footage. The infrastructure exists. The control doesn’t. That’s the difference between migration and maturity.
Maturity means knowing what you’ve built, who can access it and what happens when something fails. It means reducing the number of things that can break, tightening how data moves between systems and ensuring the core infrastructure can withstand scrutiny – technical and regulatory.
The difference isn’t philosophical. A mature cloud environment doesn’t just keep services running. It limits blast radius when something goes wrong. It makes audit trails possible. It means your security and compliance teams can actually answer the questions they’ll be asked after an incident, not scramble to piece together what happened during one.
Here’s the uncomfortable bit: if you can’t confidently explain your cloud environment to your own board – what’s running where, who has access, how data flows between systems – then you’re not mature. You’re just migrated. And the gap between those two states is where breaches happen.
For institutions still migrating, build maturity in now, while you can still make architectural decisions that matter. For those already in the cloud, ask whether your infrastructure would survive honest scrutiny – because, eventually, someone will provide it. A regulator, an auditor or the press. Better to know the answer before they do!
Is it worth a conversation? For a deeper look at what cloud maturity means in practice, read our cloud excellence solution brief. Or if you’re uncertain where the vulnerabilities sit in your own estate, let’s talk through what a rapid assessment would surface.
