For millions of students across the country and world, school’s back in session. It’s a joyful time for parents, but a painful season for students and IT staff. As Summer winds down, so too, do the number of days a school district has to provision and deprovision new and returning students for the upcoming school year. When combined with the barrage of threats targeting education institutions, back to school season poses a potential nightmare scenario.
And, that’s not all. In addition to external threats, many school districts around the world still rely on manual, homegrown, or outdated solutions to manage the identities of its students and faculty. Not only are these outdated systems costly and cumbersome to maintain, they leave school districts and—most of all—students exposed to an increasingly risky cybersecurity landscape.
Which is why we’re thrilled to serve as the first Identity Management partner for PowerSchool. PowerSchool is the leading provider of K-12 education application technology. Our partnership creates a unique opportunity to help schools save time and resources by streamlining the onboarding and offboarding process, as well as, secure student and teacher access to education applications. The partnership will deliver new capabilities to sync user profile information from PowerSchool across a school’s portfolio of applications and user directories.
Improving User Lifecycle Management
Education institutions have unique identity and access management (IAM) challenges for students, faculty, and staff. Imagine adding and losing thousands of new users each year. Then factor in changing the roles of students who advance to a new grade level and require new applications, etc. For most school districts, these complex user needs create productivity challenges, particularly when managed by outdated or homegrown solutions.
Without a centralized platform to manage applications and technologies, IT administrators have to replicate user data manually across siloed systems, causing delays in how quickly they can get technology into their students’ and faculty’s hands and update those records when roles change or students graduate.
“We’re excited to leverage the power of OneLogin’s Identity Platform with PowerSchool SIS. The joint solution will help us streamline manual IT processes for managing identities across our fifty-four schools. Now, we can onboard and offboard students and staff quickly and securely which increases time for classroom learning.” – Malik Nicholas, Senior Associate Director of IT, Project Management
Connecting Teachers and Students with Education Resources
Modern classrooms rely on a variety of third-party applications to support student growth and engagement. PowerSchool enables schools and districts to meet the demand for education resources by providing classrooms with unified technology that promotes productivity. By integrating with OneLogin, our partnership enables IT staff to streamline the provisioning cycle for these applications.
How does it work?
The OneLogin and PowerSchool integration mitigates the challenge of seasonal turnover in school districts. By connecting PowerSchool’s Active Directory (AD) environment with OneLogin’s connectors, IT staffs that leverage PowerSchool synchronize accurate student information from PowerSchool to Active Directory, LDAP, and across common systems like Microsoft Office365, G-Suite, and thousands of other apps.
The integration also provides productivity gains for faculty and students. Traditionally, teachers may have to wear an “IT hat” to reset or provide students passwords. Since OneLogin provides single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA), teachers can focus on what’s most important: student growth and engagement.
Want to learn more about the OneLogin and PowerSchool integration? Read the press release! Also, check out additional resources for education institutions!
