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One SSO solution to transform identity access: Ping Identity, ProofID and Edinburgh Napier University.

How every type of application was brought together in the same managed SSO solution, built on a hybrid of PingFederate and PingOne

Challenge

Edinburgh Napier University has a large and diverse student body, with more than 18,000 students from 109 countries around the world. And with the University based across three campuses in Edinburgh, the demands of students and staff users for data and application access are extremely varied.

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The University had an existing single sign-on (SSO) solution in place, but it had only been applied to a small number of external applications. Needing to access more skills and deliver a more complete user experience across internal and external systems, the University looked for a single technology that would provide single sign-on across all its applications for all of its users.

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How can Edinburgh Napier University apply one SSO solution to every application and system within its IT estate?

Solution

Bringing external and internal SSO access together in a single solution

The solution was a hybrid implementation of Ping Identity’s PingFederate on-premise, and a hosted PingOne tenancy to provide an application ‘launchpad’. This was implemented and managed by ProofID in its role as managed service provider.

This allowed the University to establish a unified and seamless SSO experience, where users can authenticate on their device once and not have any further need to login. This applies across all types of applications.

With PingOne as the ‘launchpad’, the University was also able to remove part of its locked-down student portal service, as it ensured that only access links to logged-on services were provided.

COMPANY FIGURES

0 Students

from 109 countries now access all applications with unified single sign-on.

0 Days

to deploy the hybrid PingFederate and PingOne solution into production.

0 Campuses

across Edinburgh brought together under one seamless SSO experience.

0 Students

from 109 countries now access all applications with unified single sign-on.

0 Days

to deploy the hybrid PingFederate and PingOne solution into production.

0 Campuses

across Edinburgh brought together under one seamless SSO experience.

Results

Rapid deployment and broad scalability for easier SSO, organisation wide

It took just 15 days for the solution to be deployed into a resilient and redundant configuration, initially in five instances (Moodle, Office365, Papercut, WebEx and EZProxy) with additional applications following later.

In many cases, this required application kits (for example, the Apache integration kit for Papercut) to enable federated SSO for many applications that don’t natively support a recognised federation protocol.