Access management in education: Ways schools are securing their users and apps
IT teams in schools have a unique set of identity and access management challenges. Between constantly evolving cybersecurity requirements, digital communication gaps with parents, and continually growing student and staff populations, IT teams have to deal with a perpetually changing ecosystem.
Additionally, every school will attack these access management challenges differently and will require different features to fit their needs. This complicates the matter even more.
Some schools and districts, however, are managing access in ingenious ways with solutions that are customized to fit their needs. Learn below how major educational institutions are battling common IAM challenges with OneLogin by One Identity.
Address changing educational populations
Anyone in education can tell you that turnover and updates are rarely so common as they are in education. Students graduate and move on or join or leave the school mid-year. Teachers retire or change roles. Schedules shift. Parents, admin and substitutes need secure access – but not the same access.
These are the environments where OneLogin thrives.
FVI School of Nursing: Group students by cohort
FVI School of Nursing uses OneLogin to group students by cohort to address their growing student population.
“It creates a much more efficient management of our systems. We can group students by cohort, keeping them all together, and then once they graduate, we deactivate them all together,” said Eusser Darling, FVI’s IT Manager.
For FVI, employing roles to differentiate between student and administrative users also helps them minimize both security and access issues.
San Jose Unified School District: Automate app access
Grade levels, site locations or cohort locations can be utilized via mappings to automate app access, as San Jose Unified School District discovered, saving them time and storage.
SJUSD benefitted from an integration of OneLogin with the storage solution Box, and Patrick Scanlan, Supervisor in Technology and Data Services for SJUSD, states that “the use of [OneLogin] and its features, and how easy it is to integrate, has given people in my department more of their time back to take care of other more interesting and productive things.”
Uncommon Schools: Fully manage user lifecycles
The non-profit organization Uncommon Schools also manages the entire lifecycle of students and staff with OneLogin and its integration with PowerSchool. They wanted a program that could update, delete or suspend user accounts through a native connection with their Active Directory environment.
For Uncommon Schools, the product was unique, and enabled the team to “streamline the onboarding and offboarding experience for complete, real-time identity lifecycle management, saving valuable time and resources.”
Simplify user experience and increase productivity for students, parents and teachers
An overused term that teachers regurgitate to their students is, “Set yourself up for success.” But students might take it more seriously if teachers could follow their own advice when it comes to cybersecurity.
Luckily, academic organizations have realized how much OneLogin can simplify the user experience for students and staff alike.
The Glennie School: Simplify login and communication
With 2,000 users on multiple apps, single sign-on (SSO) was a major need for The Glennie School in Queensland, Australia. Since SSO only requires one set of credentials for multiple apps, it drastically boosts user productivity and reduces login issues, especially among young users.
OneLogin allowed The Glennie School to minimize the number of usernames and passwords for young students. “That was important as they are only beginning to learn how to read and write, let alone remember passwords as well,” adds Matthew Russell, Information Technology Manager, The Glennie School.
Parent communication is simplified and streamlined as well through OneLogin’s integration with Google, eliminating support calls from parents who previously could not access email links. This also allows parents to access the school system’s calendars, permission forms and more.
St, John’s School: Enable centralized access to multiple apps
“If our teachers and students struggle to log in to access the many applications they need, it takes away from the fast-paced, 40-minute lessons,” says the assistant head of digital strategy for St. John’s School in the UK, Mark Sartorius. They turned to OneLogin for its enterprise-level features, its futureproofed support and its two-factor authentication model.
“Our teachers and pupils trust OneLogin. They know it works reliably and with just a single click, provides access to everything they need,” states Sartorius. For that matter, he calls it indispensable to the school’s operations.
Berklee College of Music: Configure flexibly
The notorious Berklee is not exempt from needing user friendliness in their technology. They wanted flexible access management that would integrate easily with multiple apps to simplify login and access for students and faculty.
“I think that’s really the flexibility of the platform, the type of accounts you could have, the application is configurable – it’s fairly wide,” states GAËL FROUIN, Information Security Officer for Berklee College of Music. The Berklee IT department can configure OneLogin so that internal users can log in easily, “which alleviates some issues in certain applications.”
Lower the cost, heighten the security
Compliance regulations ensure student data stays secure, but sometimes those regulations come with a large balance. What if you could ensure compliance with tested, trusted security protocols – without the hefty price tag?
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor: Get built-in 2FA
A big plus for the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor when looking for a new access management tool was the security of two-factor authentication (2FA). But not just 2FA – built-in 2FA. “A lot of companies charge extra for two-factor, which we thought was kind of shady,” said MATT IRVINE, the university’s Director of Media Services. OneLogin’s support of 2FA, along with its own, trusted 2FA app, made it enticing for this institution.
The Cleveland Institute of Art: Maximize your investment
The flexibility and functionality of OneLogin made it a critical investment for the Cleveland Institute of Art. They rolled out and provisioned iPads to all incoming freshmen and faculty. In this initiative, OneLogin completed the deployment of Google Apps across workstations, laptops and iPads in less than three weeks.
With OneLogin, the institute secured their authentication and access management processes at a comparable price that afforded them much more functionality than other options.
Pearson Education: Futureproof your enterprise
With its new platform for end-to-end administration of large-scale assessments, PearsonAccess, Pearson Education was looking for a scalable IAM solution that could support authentication needs. The security policies, fine-grained user access control, just-in-time privilege and automation capabilities made OneLogin the choice to ensure seamless IAM and risk detection at scale. Plus, the enterprise-grade security and reliability made it a solid foundation for future revenue growth.
Ease up on IT administration
IT teams withstand the worst of the login issues and manual system maintenance for any organization, and an argument can be made that IT teams in the educational field have it particularly tough.
Schools use OneLogin to take the pressure off the cybersecurity teams and gives them the time and the energy to manage more important tasks.
Muhlenberg College: Minimize manual management
The SSO portal, password management and MFA allowed the college to modernize their authentication at scale and cut down on the password reset requests and improve user experience for both IT and end users.
Lighthouse Academies: Offer help to your help desk
Casey Muse, CIO and CTO at Lighthouse Academies, states that the nonprofit network of charter schools didn’t have student accounts at all before OneLogin, and that their staff account management was “cumbersome, manual and required a lot of maintenance. It consumed large parts of our helpdesk and on-site technicians’ days. Now those days are pretty much gone.”
The automated student information system (SIS) sync to a school Active Directory (AD) gives back an enormous amount of time to the IT team, allowing them to spend less than two hours a day managing user identities thanks to OneLogin.
Conclusion
Every school and district use IAM differently – to take the load off their IT team, to comply with cybersecurity regulations, to communicate with their parent populace or to simplify access for their student body.
OneLogin is the flexible IAM solution that can be customized to your needs and help you face and fix the challenges of access management in the field of education.
