How Higher Ed IT Teams are Increasing Efficiency with Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

According to a recent survey, 39% of higher education apps run in the cloud today, and that number is expected to increase to 62% by 2021. 81% of colleges and universities plan to increase their cloud spend in 20171 . Google Docs, Office 365, Canvas, Ellucian, Blackboard, and Workday, among other cloud apps, are becoming ubiquitous in higher education. But while many colleges have a cloud-first mindset for the future, most are operating in a hybrid IT environment today, with a mixture of cloud and on-prem applications. And, most use a combination of on-prem identity and access management systems including Shibboleth, ADFS, Oracle, and IBM, as well as manual processes to manage access to these resources. Current approaches to IAM on most campuses present significant opportunities for achieving efficiencies in manual operations, infrastructure, and maintenance costs.

In a recent survey of higher education IT leaders, 46% said reducing IT costs was a top initiative in the next 12 months2. Unnecessary costs associated with legacy approaches to identity management include:

• Password Resets: Self-service password recovery is a capability that most internet users have come to expect, but many existing IAM deployments either fail to implement this critical feature, don’t cover all applications, or don’t take advantage of modern approaches like password recovery via SMS or other factor. The problem is further exacerbated by the large populations that colleges serve. A large university we spoke to counted 3,500 IT calls annually to reset passwords. According to our data, on average, IT spends 15 minutes resetting a forgotten password. This equates to roughly 875 IT hours spent resetting passwords for this particul