Missouri College Overhauls Identity Management System
A
community college in Missouri just revamped its entire IT security and
identity
arrangement, giving everybody on the 10,000-student campus a single
password
for all their accounts, changing the way they can reset passwords and
reworking
all the account permissions and entitlements — in five weeks.
Jefferson College in
Hillsboro, MO was way behind schedule with replacing
manual and automated account creation, credential management and
password reset
processes, and administrators knew the situation was creating problems for
students
and faculty, hindering business processes and threatening the school's
security
functions.
The
college
hired Fischer
International Identity to examine and quickly overhaul
all of its identity processes and the information security company did
it in
just over a month.
"I
know
Jefferson College had reservations about our ability to deliver a full
identity management deployment in five weeks," said Fischer COO Dan
Dagnall, "but
higher education needs to know that identity management doesn't have to
be hard
or risky."
The
main
areas of concentration in the identity management process
were core
business areas like admissions, enrollment, human resources and alumni
relations. Fischer implemented its Identity Suite software that
incorporates
all accounts across all campus and cloud systems.
It
provides
users with a single password for all their various accounts and gives
them the ability to automatically reset passwords anytime anywhere, if
necessary.
The new system also automatically determines who has permission to
access which
accounts, based on the user's affiliation with the college — and it did
it without
the college having to use any vendor services once the implementation
work was
done.
"This
project
required full commitment from both sides and anything less would have
put both parties at risk of project failure," said Jefferson College
Senior
Information Technology Director Tracy James. "Both Jefferson and Fischer
were
committed to meet an aggressive schedule and we achieved everything we
expected."
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.