About Owens Community College
Owens Community College is a fully accredited two-year, state-assisted higher education institution. The college offers 130 academic programs for a variety of career paths.
Challenge
With more than 200 online courses, the college attracts a web-savvy student body. "The better online service we deliver, the more in demand our school becomes," said Martin Stroud, deputy CIO of Owens Community College. "It's critical that we deliver technology with maximum ease of use."
To that end, the college needed to simplify the management of user communities. User accounts were being provisioned and deprovisioned manually, which took up to 24 hours. In addition, the college wanted to provide a single sign-on experience to bring added convenience to students while providing better controls over data in compliance with the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
The school also wanted to replace its Checkpoint VPN solution. "We had to distribute client software anytime a user wanted VPN access," said Stroud. "This was time-consuming for technicians and frustrating to users."
Solution
The college implemented Novell Identity Manager to automate account provisioning. "Novell is the leader in identity management," said Stroud. "Novell Identity Manager makes it very straightforward to integrate applications and automate processes."
The college then hired Weisberg Consulting, Inc., a Novell Gold Partner, to oversee the design and implementation of the solution. "Weisberg Consulting is one of the foremost experts in the identity management world," said Stroud. "They greatly simplified our identity management processes."
"We set out to accelerate students' access to necessary tools and create efficiencies for IT staff," said Matt Weisberg, vice president and CIO of Weisberg Consulting, Inc. "We architected a solution where the school's Banner student information system feeds into Novell Identity Manager, based on user roles, to automate account provisioning and deprovisioning. By implementing Novell Access Manager™, along with Novell SecureLogin, we gave students single sign-on access to on-premise software like the Ozone Portal, and cloud-based applications, such as Google Apps."
Ease of administration was an important factor for adopting the Novell solution. "Implementation is a walk in the park with Novell Access Manager," said Weisberg. "One of the shining examples of the solution's ease of use is its menu-based SAML implementation, which is a much better interface than competing products from IBM and Sun. All access requests are synchronized against a single authentication directory, providing convenience for students and ease of administration for IT staff."
In addition, the college uses the VPN capabilities within Novell Access Manager to give students, faculty and staff the same experience, whether they're accessing applications on campus or at home. "The Novell solution is web-based, so users no longer have to install client software on their computers," said Stroud. "That's a huge benefit."
The scalability of Novell Access Manager has also been extremely beneficial during busy registration times. "Novell Access Manager offers the flexibility of load balancing," said Stroud. "That's advantageous for an environment like ours with nearly 100,000 identities. We can dynamically add more resources as needed so students gain the performance they've come to expect when they visit our site."
The college has also deployed Novell Storage Manager to automate provisioning of file storage for its users.
Results
Using Novell identity and access management solutions, Owens Community College has improved students' online experiences while freeing up the IT staff to focus on higher value tasks. User provisioning and deprovisioning is automated and students can now authenticate once to access all the applications they need. "We used to spend two weeks each semester administering accounts," said Stroud. "Now provisioning and deprovisioning is done in just ten minutes instead of 24 hours."
The Novell identity and access management solution has saved the college a tremendous amount of money. "We would have needed at least two more FTEs to manage our environment without the automation we gained from Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager," said Stroud. "Moreover, students now use the same interface and credentials for all resources. And we have confidence in our ability to safeguard students' data in compliance with FERPA."
The college is already planning to extend its use of Novell technology. "We plan to utilize Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager in unison to further build bridges between our managed environment and existing unmanaged systems," said James Specht, system architect of Owens Community College. "We are encouraged by the savings we've already achieved from these solutions."
Having authentication, single sign-on and authorization capabilities within a single solution makes it easy to incorporate new applications. "There are hundreds of academic web-based applications we'd like to enable single sign-on for," said Stroud. "Moving forward, we can tie these into our existing authentication schema to meet the ever changing needs of our students."