Page 6 - CT Innovation in Education, 2021

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Easier Identity and Access Management
The last thing IT should burden students with is a fog of logins. The use of an identity cloud makes accessing their digital lives easier and more secure.
Ryan Schaller
Senior CIAM Developer Specialist, Okta
LEARNING HASN’T BEEN EASY FOR STUDENTS.
In the past, the biggest worry may have been
confusion about the latest assignment or concerns about financial aid. Now, they’re just as likely to be boggled about whether it’s their day to go into the classroom, wondering how their projects will be done when half
the team is working strictly from home, or dealing with
the fallout of a positive COVID test or food and housing insecurities.
In a realm where technology has become essential, the last thing the IT organization should burden students — or any other users on campus — with is a fog of logins. Yet it can’t be helped. Nowadays, the college experience requires a litany of applications. The basics include network access, the SaaS-based productivity application suite, the learning management system, a videoconferencing program or
two, and maybe library collections. Then, depending on
the major, there’s software for statistics, design, math
and science, simulation and business. And let’s not
forget university services for advising, financial, tutoring, plagiarism checking and help desk. Every single one of those programs or services needs to authenticate the user before granting access.
The Problems of IAM Sprawl
Single sign-on (SSO) has long been a boon for making the authentication process more efficient. Yet, because of their distributed structures, most institutions haven’t gone all the way with SSO. It may be that program control for the identity and access management (IAM) layer is maintained for some applications by central IT and for others by a given college or department. IT may lack the staff to keep up with the programming requirements and/or the sudden influx of new demand. Or the college or university may be working with other institutions, each operating autonomously even as they need to share people, programs and research data.
Then there are the security aspects. While SSO makes
for a centralized approach to application access, that access also poses a big risk: If a cybercriminal gets unauthorized access through the SSO, they will be able to access all of the associated applications.
Embedding multi-factor authentication (MFA) into
the login process adds a needed level of protection to authentication processes to keep accounts truly secure. But students are still stuck with multiple logins, and institutions have to try to keep up with a sprawling and complicated IAM system.
The Power of an Identity Cloud
Tackling identity and access management in an IT modernization initiative can do a lot of good for campus users. Not only will it improve the learning experience and lessen software access frustrations, but the right solution can add an extra layer of security up front through deeper identity proofing and by enabling organizations to track and manage changing user roles based on predetermined policies.
The Okta Identity Cloud serves as an independent and neutral platform that securely connects the right people to the right technologies at the right time, reducing the effort required by IT to balance the needs of access and security.
The Okta Identity Cloud incorporates Single Sign-On, Adaptive MFA and API Access Management. But the
magic ingredient is really the architecture, which empowers organizations to unify services across disparate organizations through a hub-and-spoke model that serves as a centralized identity layer:
The hub acts as the centralized identity provider,
using standards such as security assertion markup language (SAML) and OpenID to integrate with numerous downstream applications, whether those are in the cloud or on-premise, to provide access and provisioning capabilities across the network.
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