About Tecnológico de Monterrey
Tecnológico de Monterrey, founded in 1943, is a private, non-profit educational institution with 33 campuses across Mexico and academic centers in Latin America, North America and Europe. The organization serves a community of more than 80,000 students, and its alumni run 38 of the 200 largest companies in Mexico.
Challenge
Tecnológico de Monterrey, in its commitment to leadership in the education sector, wanted to deploy a centralized e-mail solution for nearly 100,000 users spread across its 33 campuses. The aim was to enable self-service, without compromising security.
In addition, with various different types of user–students, academics, IT staff and so on–requiring differing levels of access to different systems, Tecnológico de Monterrey needed a solution that could support role-based access.
To meet these identity and access management challenges, Tecnológico de Monterrey wanted a solution that would provide a centralized single directory containing all user account information, and synchronize identities and access rights across the entire distributed IT infrastructure. In particular, Tecnológico de Monterrey wanted a solution that would automate most low-level identity management functions, in order to minimize the workload for its IT staff.
Novell Solution
Tecnológico de Monterrey looked at the available solutions on the market, aiming to select a robust and secure identity management platform that would be capable of scaling to meet the needs of the Institute's very large user-base.
"We decided to implement a solution based on Novell Identity Manager because it would allow us to synchronize our heterogeneous platforms, while providing all the flexibility, scalability and security we needed," said Pablo Romo, Director of Operations and Technology Strategy at Tecnológico de Monterrey. "Novell designed a comprehensive solution, which enables us to leverage technology to simplify our user management landscape."
Tecnológico de Monterrey was impressed by Novell's proposal–especially when it became clear that Novell would be able to migrate 85,000 of its users to the Novell Identity Manager platform in just a few months.
The Novell solution uses its metadirectory tools to gather information on user identities and access privileges, and consolidates it in a centralized identity vault. Novell Identity Manager then synchronizes this consistent store of user information across most of the systems. As part of the solution, Novell implemented a portal that enables new users to request an account and register their details online. Within a very short period, several thousand users set up their new accounts through the portal–representing a significant saving in time and manual effort for the IT administrators.
The quality of service for academic users has increased considerably, since the Novell solution provides them with a single sign-on to all the main systems at Tecnológico de Monterrey. Staff and students can now access the information they need remotely, without the need to remember multiple user names and passwords.
"Novell helped us to synchronize the dispersed user account information held in different repositories across our infrastructure," said Romo.
Results
By working closely together, the Novell Consulting team and the Tecnológico de Monterrey in-house IT team were able to integrate the access information contained in applications and repositories across a variety of different platforms.
Users can now register a new account within just 15 minutes, a substantial improvement over the previous approach. Moreover, the single sign-on capability of Novell Identity Manager has reduced the number of passwords that users need to remember–which had previously been as high as seven for some users.
"It is much easier for new students to get started with their courses and play a full part in university life," said Romo. "With the old system, they sometimes had to wait days to get e-mail access; now it is all ready before they arrive."
With Novell Identity Manager, Tecnológico de Monterrey has standardized and automated its user administration, both improving service levels and reducing the administrative burden for its IT department.
"We quickly saw positive results from the Novell solution," said Romo. "Novell Identity Manager provides tools and functionalities that enable an organization to create and easily manage a single, centralized user directory."