From Zero to Hero: Dealing with Active Directory and Identity Management in Higher Education with Constantly Moving Targets

Unique User Challenges in Higher Ed

In the higher-education landscape, universities and colleges face distinct identity and access challenges as they deal with ongoing user-status changes. People are coming and going. New devices need access. Departments, colleges and schools each have unique identity management needs. Large changes in students, alumni, faculty and staff happen frequently, and often users have multiple roles and access needs at the same time.

Student-user lifecycles in particular are constantly in transition. A person can move from being an applicant, to a student, to alumni – and potentially to being faculty, staff or a researcher. Often a person can be several of these roles at once. The process of manually provisioning and deprovisioning large groups of students through this cycle is daunting, time consuming, expensive and often fraught with human error.