City Year puts the focus on students, instead of passwords & provisioning

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Christine S.: City Year is a national education not-for-profit. We serve kids in underserved communities that need assistance staying in school to graduate on track on time. My team and I are responsible for supporting the entire network, so that includes staff in our HQ office as well as our 27 sites along with all the AmeriCorps volunteers that basically work at a school partner site on a daily basis. We, in the past five years, have migrated from a very on-prem environment with over 70 systems into four enterprise applications. The reason City Year invested in a technology strategy that was web enabled was most of our staff is working at a remote site, meaning a school partner site. Mobility is incredibly important to us. It was incredibly important for all of our AmeriCorps volunteers, as well as our staff, to have access around the clock and then to have it be seamless.

Christine S.: OKTA was the piece that pulled it all together for us. Our evaluation process for Identity Management was pretty focused. We were very interested in partnering with someone who was already cloud-based. We wanted that to be part of our overall strategy. It was important for us to have a tool that could scale with us, but also provided seamless access and also helped us think about security and compliance all in one. Our most recent success with the OKTA team was the deployment of HR driven IT provisioning. We have a very short window of time where we off board all of our AmeriCorps volunteers and onboard them within a 30 day window. We had successfully installed, with the help of the OKTA team, that provisioning tool and are now 100% automating all of those IDs for folks coming into the network as well as off boarding.

Christine S.: We've been able to lift a lot of the day to day burden off of our IT staff and refocus that workforce on other projects that are aligned to City Year's mission. Annual savings, between password support and just workforce, we're saving over $120,000 a year. Everyone at OKTA has been extremely supportive of the City Year/OKTA partnership. Someone always picks up. Someone is always there. You're always on. We're a small, lean IT team and we really appreciate the opportunity to partner with everyone at OKTA, which has made the rollout of Identity Management at City Year a huge success.

A national education nonprofit dedicated to helping kids in underserved communities stay in school, City Year’s staff and volunteers are always on the go and across the country. That said, seamless, around-the-clock mobility is of utmost importance to all of them, making their pursuit of cloud-based technology and solutions a priority goal. Okta was able to give them a helping hand with their identity management and secure authentication needs, allowing them to refocus their efforts on what matters most to their mission.