University of Salford

Controlling Access to University IT Resources

With more than 19,000 students, the University of Salford in Manchester, United Kingdom, includes several campuses around the city. The university is modernizing its entire infrastructure, including a £130 million investment in new buildings and facilities and a renovation of existing locations. An important part of this modernization program is integrating the university's many IT systems and providing easier and more secure access to campus resources through identity management software.

Customer Challenges

Enable the university to better manage the provisioning and access to information resources.
Establish identity management as the first building block of the university's IT systems integration agenda and strategy.
Understand the process side and governance structure of identity management

Solution

Java Enterprise Systems' Identity Management suite provided the structure and robustness around which the University of Salford has begun to integrate disparate administrative and academic applications under one consistent access policy.

Business Results

Improved security and consistency of policy in provisioning and de-provisioning of access to campus systems
Ability to re-deploy administrators to higher value, more productive tasks

Products and Services

Story Details

Like universities around the world, the University of Salford knew that its computing resources were increasingly being used by individuals from the outside – including prospective students, research collaborators from other universities, community partners, alumni, and parents. However, defining exactly who was using these resources presented a challenge because of a lack of centralized control over individual departmental or project-based systems.

With a goal of improving security and control of access to critical campus information resources, the University of Salford determined that identity management would be the foundation of its IT systems integration program. By providing consistent, secure, and flexible access to computing resources, the university would be able to reduce administrative costs for provisioning and de-provisioning and increase user satisfaction by providing single sign-on access. In addition, the university's IT management would have more knowledge about and control over who is using the institution's computing systems, how, and for what purpose.

" The reason we chose Sun Microsystems was that we were looking for a strategic partner, not a vendor. We wanted someone who shared our vision of the Digital Campus. "

— Martine Carassik, Associate Director - Information Systems, University of Salford

The university was also attracted to identity management because of its real-time nature, which would enable the institution to immediately provision and de-provision individuals instead of waiting for batch processing systems to add or remove people in one to three days.

Sun was selected for this important project because of the company's focus on higher education and the university's belief in maintaining strong relationships with its technology partners. By working closely with Sun Client Services to plan, architect, and implement its identity management solution, the university was able to leverage the experience of individuals who have worked on numerous other identity management projects, produce a reliable roadmap for implementation during an initial proof of concept, and effectively educate its key audiences.

The university's identity management system is currently being rolled out in phases. Of course, one of the most difficult tasks facing any institution planning and implementing an identity management system is identifying what systems need to be integrated and who the users of these systems are. Initially, the University of Salford's analysis indicated that about four to five thousand individuals from outside the school might have to be accommodated in the school's new identity management system. As the university's understanding of this external user segment grew, however, so did its system requirement. Currently, the university estimates that more than 41,000 external associates will interact with the institution within the next twelve months. The university's new identity management system will provide a means to establish roles and policies for these individuals as well as internal users.

The University of Salford has already experienced returns on its investment. In addition to improving security and control of computing resources, the university has also established a senior, cross functional policy-making group on campus to develop and maintain an identity management governance structure.

However, the elimination of tedious provisioning and de-provisioning activities from the jobs of hundreds of people across campus may be the ultimate benefit for the university. Not only does this improve staff job satisfaction, but it also allows these people to be re-deployed to more valuable and rewarding tasks and eliminates a major source of human error in the process.