Security

Radboud U Adopts New Identity Management Software for 25,000 Students

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/22/14

Radboud University has turned to identity management software to gain control over user access to network resources, including secure data. The Dutch institution has about 25,000 students, 3,500 faculty and 20,000 external users who need to be managed. The institution was seeking a means for provisioning and deprovisioning user access, providing access governance, handling simple policy requests and doing violation checks. It chose Dell's Identity Manager.

With a continual changeover in the institution's population each year, the university faced several challenges, including "entitlement creep," when users changed roles. While new access may have been granted, rarely was previous access ended. "The risk is that people remain authorized for things they shouldn't be according to their new role," said Information Manager Wopke Veenstra in a YouTube video about the adoption of the software.

The identity management application already in place "couldn't cope with the amount of change that was needed without greatly increasing the staff," noted Senior Identify and Access Manager Jos Groenewegen.

An uptick in data breaches at other institutions in the country increased concerns. So the university worked with Intragen, a Dell certified partner to assess options. "Identity Manager differentiated itself from other solutions due to its completeness — it is a single product to tackle all of the issues we face, both on provisioning and governance levels," said Groenewegen in a statement.

The implementation has cut provisioning time for a new user in half, the university said, and because processes previously handled in batch are now done nearly in real-time, enrollment time has also shrunk from several days to one day. Self service options have enabled users to handle certain functions, such as password reset, reducing IT work.

"In today's competitive educational environment, Radboud University needed to explore ways we could make the access experience for data and apps more satisfying and efficient, not only for our staff, but also for students and their parents," explained Groenewegen. "At the same time, we have a very complex user base, as many users have multiple roles. It was critical for us to find a solution that would help stop 'entitlement creep,' and ensure people have exactly the access they need."