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It's the start of a new school year. Are you approaching it with anticipation, dread, or a mixture of both? You're probably working overtime to ensure that thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of new and returning students, faculty, and staff have secure and appropriate access to online campus resources like email, libraries, course registration, and online learning.

That's why identity and access management once again ranked so high on the EDUCAUSE annual list of top 10 IT issues. "The connection between managing information about identities and an individual's access to information and services now extends to nearly every aspect of academic, administrative and community experience," the survey's authors said.

Note the use of the word "community." Identity and access management doesn't just apply to provisioning students — although that's a big (and often tedious) job. Increasingly, individuals outside the university need access to your computing resources. That list can include prospective students, research collaborators from other universities, community partners, alumni, and parents.

And within that community, users often have multiple "roles." For instance, a student may also be a part-time employee, and need to be provisioned with access to multiple systems based on those roles.

As Leslie Lambert, Sun IT vice president and chief security officer, put it in a recent editorial for Sun's Identity Insights newsletter, "In this environment, it's not enough to establish and verify a user's identity at the gate to the castle, so to speak. You must also be able to provide the user with keys to certain rooms and not others, and to add or take away from that set of keys when the user's role changes.

"Finally, you have to be able to track the whereabouts of users at all times, to be sure they're only where they're supposed to be and that they haven't somehow gotten into a room to which they shouldn't have access."

Identity in Action at Educational Institutions
This can represent quite a challenge, to say the least — a challenge the University of Salford recently tackled head-on with the Sun Java Enterprise System's Identity Management Suite. Deployment of the suite provided the structure and robustness around which the U.K. university has begun to integrate disparate administrative and academic applications under one consistent access policy. Its real-time nature and single sign-on capabilities will offer flexible access to computing resources not only to its internal users, but to nearly 41,000 external associates within the next year.

And the university is discovering another benefit from Sun's identity management solution — sparing hundreds of staffers across campus from the tedious tasks of provisioning and deprovisioning. This makes staff members a lot happier with their jobs and allows them to focus on more valuable and rewarding activities. That sounds like good news to me.

Other institutions reaping benefits from Sun's Identity Management Suite include George Mason University, which has gained control over the provisioning of more than 30 major campus applications with different sign-ins and rules. While easing the burden on system administration, George Mason has also increased security through tighter control of passwords and rules.

In the meantime, we've got a plethora of identity management resources to help you. Subscribe to the Identity Management Buzz Blog. Listen to podcasts from Sun's identity management team, customers, partners, and colleagues about what's happening in the industry and much more. Or use our handy ROI Calculator to see how much Sun can slash your provisioning costs.

Visit Sun at EDUCAUSE 2007
Want to find out more? Come to Sun's identity management workshops at the EDUCAUSE 2007 conference in Seattle on Wednesday, October 24, and Thursday, October 25. We'll explore how Sun's comprehensive portfolio of identity management solutions can help you manage, protect, store, verify, and share identity data.

This workshop will also examine Sun compliance solutions that provide a complete approach to enterprise identity management and compliance, with preventative compliance and centralized control. This will be important to those of you working to meet state and federal regulations such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

Also at EDUCAUSE 2007, we're holding workshops on October 24 and 25 on building service-oriented architectures (SOA) with Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS), a fully-featured suite that addresses the development and deployment of integration processes and composite applications. Whether you are technically oriented or business-focused, this workshop will explain what SOA is, how to implement it, and the benefits to you.

I look forward to seeing you in Seattle, and learning about the challenges you're facing as this school year gets under way.

Best regards,

Joe Hartley
VP, Global Government, Education and Healthcare

Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com