In a recent blog post by Matt Cox, Senior Manager of Solutions Consulting at Samanage, Cox explored how employee-centric methodologies are the new heart of IT strategy. Technology is now smarter than ever and IT teams can better harness that power by aligning proactive solutions and methodologies that empower employees.

Schools, in particular, have amplified needs around employee service, and Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a critical piece of the puzzle. Many IT teams are cobbling together convoluted systems to manage and serve a wide-ranging network of users, from students to faculty to alumni.

All these populations have different roles and resource needs, serving up quite a challenge for IT teams in how they provide and manage access to systems. Combined with limited resources, schools have no choice but to find ways to scale and empower all their users to reduce the overhead on IT.

A few key challenges universities and school districts face around IAM:

IAM Sources of Truth: Unlike businesses, who tend to have one source of truth for identity management (usually a directory such as Active Directory, LDAP, or HCM like Workday), school districts and universities rely on multiple sources. They also have even more systems to rely on or to merge, such as the systems for the library, sports teams, and alumni organizations.

User Complexity: Although businesses also have users with multiple roles, this situation is more frequent and complex in the education industry. For example, a faculty member is often also alumni and sometimes a parent; a staff member can also be a student.

Constant Access and Role Changes: Roles change constantly, making manual provisioning a nightmare. Each year a student comes in with a different status. Each semester or quarter, their instructors and classes change. Each graduating class becomes alumni. The identity system also needs to support temporary guests, like substitute teachers or students who are taking online courses.

“In a school environment, you have a large percentage of users leaving every single year. All of a sudden you just lose 3,000 users, and then add another 3,000 a few months later. It doesn’t happen in any other organization,” says Patrick Scanlan, Supervisor in Technology and Data Services at San Jose Unified School District.

How employee-focused ITSM and IDaaS solutions can make a difference

The complex and unique IAM needs of an education organization make a comprehensive solution hard to find, but finding complementary technology is a good start.

OneLogin and Samanage have a great partnership to help get you closer to your efficiency goals and get users the resources they need securely. The joint solution offers:

• Flexibility that fits with your existing architecture. It works with you, not against you.
• Built-in processes that proactively address the needs of your users – i.e. Password Reset
• Simplified, convenient single sign-on login so users can get to the tools they need faster
• AI-Driven capabilities such as adaptive authentication to ensure student information is protected, requiring only the touch of a button to verify your identity

“Samanage and OneLogin work closely to help ensure customer success and fast onboarding. “[With OneLogin as our] single, unified portal… people understand that there is this one place to go and they can get everything. Further, once a user account is created, the ability to provision users into G Suite, Samanage, Lynda.com and other [apps] has improved IT efficiency.” – Allen Chen, Chief Information Officer, Muhlenberg College

Take a quick tour at https://www.samanage.com/service-desk/integrations/onelogin/