About Koç University
Established in 1993 in Istanbul, Turkey, Koç University aims to provide a world-class education to undergraduates and to advance the global frontiers of knowledge. The university has more than 3,800 undergraduate and graduate students across engineering, nursing, natural sciences, humanities, social sciences and business, and offers a range of masters programmes.
Challenge
With a large and continually changing population of staff and students, it was a significant challenge for the IT team at Koç University to manage user identities and access rights. The university has a wide range of different applications, and the need to manually maintain user directories and manage passwords was a serious drain on productivity.
The start and end of each academic year were creating an additional workload for the IT team, with users joining or leaving the university. Staff had created scripts to automate some areas of account creation, but it remained difficult to provide timely access for new students and ensure that expired user accounts were fully deactivated. Essentially, the team needed to create or remove the same user accounts multiple times across all relevant systems.
The situation for staff and students was also far from ideal, as they needed to remember multiple sets of login credentials. The university set out to find a solution that would simplify management, reduce administrative effort, accelerate provisioning and deprovisioning, and improve quality of service.
Novell Solution
Koç University selected Novell Identity Manager running on Novell Open Enterprise Server to integrate and synchronise user management across its heterogeneous infrastructure. The Novell identity and security management solution gives the university a single point of control over user identities, passwords and access rights.
"Novell Identity Manager gave us the ability to synchronise identity information across our different systems," said Banu Atam Sari. "One of the key reasons for choosing the Novell solution was that it catered to the large size of our organisation–other solutions we considered did not scale as well."
Novell Identity Manager acts as a central repository for all information on users and access rights, and keeps all connected systems synchronised as information changes. The university has created workflows to automatically provision accounts for new students across all relevant systems, and removing a user account immediately revokes that user's access rights to all university systems.
"In the past, it was a time-consuming task to deactivate user rights at the time of graduation or if a member of staff left the university, partly because it was not immediately clear which systems they had logins for," said Ertugrul Dogan, Network & Systems Specialist, Koç University. "Novell Identity Manager brings all relevant information into a single point of control, so it's quick and easy to create or cancel accounts."
The self-service portal in Novell Identity Manager enables staff and students at Koç University to manage their own passwords, reducing the strain on the IT team and increasing user satisfaction.
"With Novell Identity Manager, password management is extremely easy, because the users themselves have complete control," said Hüseyin Zengin, Network & Systems Specialist, Koç University. "his saves considerable time and effort for the IT team, as we do not need to keep informing users about their passwords, or resetting them if they forget."
Results
Novell Identity Manager has simplified and accelerated user management at Koç University, reducing administrative effort and costs while enabling better and faster service to users. The university can set up new users within hours rather than days, and password synchronisation means that users need remember only one set of login credentials for all their applications.
"We can handle user management tasks far more rapidly than before, and the speed of deprovisioning expired users mean that security is better too," said Sari. "With the increased automation and efficiency offered by Novell Identity Manager, we estimate that our workload in this area has decreased by at least 50 percent."
The use of workflows to automate common tasks such as user provisioning is saving enormous amounts of time and effort for the IT team at Koç University. With Novell Identity Manager providing automation and a single point of control, the organisation can focus valuable staff resources on other issues.
"Novell Identity Manager handles much of the user management workload," said Dogan. "This improves the quality of service while keeping us free to address other priorities."
"The university will soon open new campuses in new locations, and Novell Identity Manager will make it easier for us to expand," said Zengin. "As we add more users and applications into the central identity management environment, our own workload will remain static."