Your first .edu login should feel like a promise of potential: a secure door into everything your university has to offer—from class registration and library resources to alumni support and HR. Instead, students and staff often meet a “digital jungle.”
The EDUCAUSE 2025 agenda offers a clear path through this complexity, with three critical priorities as waypoints: Administrative Simplification, Smoothing the Student Journey, and Taming the Digital Jungle. The journey through all three starts with a unified identity platform that replaces tangled chaos with intentional simplicity. By converging identity onto a single platform, you establish the central control needed to simplify administration, smooth the campus journey, and truly tame the digital jungle. Here’s how:
Start with identity to deliver administrative simplification
Administrative complexity is an expensive drag on your mission. Standardizing how people sign in, how access is granted, and how permissions change as roles evolve removes time-consuming manual approvals and the chaos of managing permissions by spreadsheet. An identity platform centralizes policy and automation, so every system benefits from a simpler, more dependable operating model for IT.
Make access easy and secure to smooth the campus journey
Students, faculty, and staff shouldn’t have to memorize your entire org chart just to get help resetting their password. With Single Sign-On (SSO) and phishing-resistant passkeys, the journey from applicant to alumni and from new hire to retiree becomes a seamless, coherent experience. As EDUCAUSE notes, the goal is to use technology and data to improve and personalize services, enabling students to focus on learning while administrative tasks become effortless.
Turn the “digital jungle” into a managed garden
Tool sprawl and scattered data increase risk and cost. A single identity control plane helps you get control of your technology portfolio by streamlining logins, retiring redundant access paths, and applying consistent governance across applications and datasets. The result is an intentional, auditable environment that is easier to secure and simpler to use.
Understanding these priorities is the first step. The next is seeing how a modern platform brings this vision to life with specific capabilities.
How Okta’s unified identity platform operationalizes strategic priorities
Create one secure door in to smooth the campus journey
Implement Single Sign-On (SSO) with phishing-resistant Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) like passkeys (which replace passwords with biometrics) and WebAuthn. Use Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (AMFA) policies to add a layer of risk-based intelligence. This allows you to streamline access for trusted users while challenging only high-risk logins, like an administrator accessing the financial aid database from a new device.
Automate the nuances of the higher ed lifecycle to simplify administration
Connect your identity platform to your SIS and HR systems to drive automated provisioning, deprovisioning, and temporary access. This ensures day-one readiness for new students and staff and timely off-boarding when they leave. This is where the benefits of administrative simplification become tangible.
Govern access with clear, automated policies to tame the digital jungle
Instead of managing permissions through email requests and spreadsheets, use automated rules like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to ensure people only see what they're supposed to. This ensures that your analytics and student services are based on accurate, governed data, rather than outdated or incorrect access rights.
The path forward
A unified identity platform creates a single control plane for your institution. You transform the digital jungle into a well-managed garden: simpler operations through automated workflows, smoother student journeys from applicant to alumni, and a technology landscape that's both secure and accessible. Modern identity doesn’t just solve today's complexity; it offers the foundation for delivering on tomorrow's priorities: data empowerment, faster technology ROI, and resilience against evolving risks.
Your next cohort of students and new faculty members can experience what everyone on campus deserves: an educational journey supported, not hindered, by the systems meant to serve them. That journey starts with identity.
Find us at EDUCAUSE
Book time with Okta’s higher‑ed team to map your simplification roadmap
https://regionalevents.okta.com/educause2025
Explore more on trust and security
To learn how a modern identity platform helps restore trust and build a bridge to a more secure future, read the first post in our series: Bridging Past and Future with Identity-First Security
