Transforming Learning and Productivity with Identity Management

Lighthouse Academies (LHA) is a national nonprofit network of charter schools dedicated to preparing a population of scholars, who would otherwise face a future with limited opportunity, for college, career, and life in an arts-enriched environment.

Challenges
From an operational standpoint, Lighthouse Academies (LHA) started from scratch when they hired Casey Muse, CIO and CTO, in 2016. They needed to set up various systems to create and manage student identities, student application access, and to improve the overall productivity of their students. None of this would have been possible for them without adopting an access management solution. Without automation, LHA knew that they could not scale their organization to add 6,000 more student accounts into their systems and maintain control. They realized that they needed to find an identity management cloud solution that resolved all of their needs.

Besides manual apps provisioning for on- and off-boarding, none of LHA on-prem servers were actually connected across the organization. The local school charters are each owned by different non-profit organizations that have their own boards. It is a challenge when LHA has to provide a cohesive experience across the schools but still respect their independence.

Solution
LHA has multiple student information systems (SIS) which provide the primary source of truth for students. Every night the SIS will sync to a local Active Directory (AD) server at the school site. They used OneLogin's Active Directory Connector to link to their AD environment and automatically pull added or changed identities and Organizational Units (OU) into OneLogin's cloud directory. The OneLogin directory provides a global view of every identity across the entire network.

“From the beginning, it was clear that OneLogin understood our unique academic and non-profit needs right away and they were more about the partnership with LHA, which made a really big difference for us. And, honestly, we've seen that continue ever since we've been on the platform,” states Muse. “Having a universal directory that sits on top of everything in our organization, OneLogin has enabled us to support more application requests and initiatives, made us much more productive, and the work we need to do much easier.”

Results
“The biggest win across the organization, with the largest business impact from OneLogin, is an infrastructure that enables us to have over 6,000 unique student accounts,” explains Muse. We didn't have student accounts at all and our 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 are pretty much gone. “I now run an organization of over 7,000 accounts with less than two hours a day spent on managing user identity, and that’s all thanks to OneLogin.”

Why OneLogin?
OneLogin brings speed and integrity to the modern enterprise with an award-winning single sign-on and identity management platform. Our portfolio of solutions secure connections across all users, all devices and every application, helping enterprises drive new levels of business integrity and operational velocity across their entire app portfolios.