Established in 2004, the University of the Arts London is Europe’s largest specialist arts and design university, formed of six colleges with international reputations in art, design, fashion, communication and performing arts. The university has around 19,000 students from over 100 countries, and more than 3,500 staff. Additionally, the university offers many short courses, attended by more than 20,000 students each year.

The university has recently made a strategic decision to implement Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud service as an email and collaboration platform for its staff and students. As part of the migration to Office 365, the university required a secure authentication service to allow its users to access Office 365 whilst retaining compatibility with the existing Identity Management solution. Initially the university considered an on-premise solution based upon Microsoft’s ADFS technology, but ultimately realized that a more robust, flexible and scalable service was required.

Jim Nottingham, Chief Information Officer and Director of University IT Services, explains:

“There were several key requirements which drove our selection of an authentication service for Office 365. Firstly, it is essential that our staff and students can access the Office 365 service at any time – with that in mind we needed a resilient service hosted externally to the university, to ensure that authentication would continue to operate independently of the Apple computers and personal BYOD users. We needed a service which had 100% compatibility with Office 365 from all devices, regardless of operating system or location which provided a seamless experience to our users.”

The university ultimately selected ProofID’s hosted Office 365 authentication service, which is built on the market leading enterprise federation and SSO product, PingFederate. Hosted in a Tier-3 UK data center, the fully-managed and enterprise features such as seamless login for domain joined computers and social login.