Syracuse University: Provisioning Delivers Secure Self Service

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Syracuse University: Provisioning Delivers Secure Self Service

4/29/2003

By Gary McGinnis

Syracuse University aims to be "the leading student-centered research university" that d'es everything possible to improve the day-to-day lives of its 15,000 students.

That means, among other things, eliminating the usual wait to activate a computing account or the need to call the help desk when forgetting the password to an e-mail account. Through an online self-service interface that went live in August 2002, Syracuse students can securely activate their computing accounts and perform other account management functions themselves.

In addition to its primary goal of improving the student experience, Syracuse saves costs by eliminating the need to staff a temporary office to help students activate their computing accounts.

Network Access
The challenges faced by Syracuse are familiar to any college or university that needs to reduce clerical costs, improve customer service, tighten security, and do a better job of auditing its access control processes. Educational institutions are currently faced with the challenge of managing complex networks in which a person's access rights to digital resources must be approved, canceled, or adjusted numerous times in a single year.

Secure network access is crucial for universities and Syracuse is the perfect example of why provisioning technologies are a "must-have" technology for the higher education market.

Provisioning is a secure and cost-effective tool for centralizing university computing accounts and eliminates the need to hire an enormous part-time staff to administer and manage the digital resources and multiple accounts for our ever-changing network of students, faculty, and staff.

Reclaiming Resources
The lack of a central solution for providing account management and other IT services can drive up administrative costs, especially as schools hire expensive temporary help to cope with registration crunches, or staff costly help desks to manage routine problems. Customer service suffers as students stand in long lines or must wait for regular business hours to contact a staff member to solve their problem. It is almost impossible to enforce security policies, or to make sure students are "de-provisioned" at the end of their academic careers, when access is granted or denied by multiple administrators in multiple departments.

Furthermore, it's critical, now more than ever, that a person's resources are reclaimed the moment they leave campus or no longer have a legitimate need for access. In fact, federal regulations like the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), the USA PATRIOT Act, and others are driving universities to maintain accurate records of access to resources. The absence of a central provisioning solution makes it expensive and time consuming to prove compliance with these new regulations.

Self Service
Syracuse's journey to online self-service began in the fall of 2001. That's when the department held a series of public forums asking the students which functions they'd most like to see online. Their requests included the ability to manage the computing accounts that give them access to e-mail, computing labs, online storage and printing, and applications such as high-end statistical packages hosted on shared Unix servers.