Seamless student & staff experience

INDUSTRY / Education

SOLUTION / Workforce, Partner & Customer Identity

CHALLENGE

The university wanted to provide the best IT customer experience without compromising operational standards but with budgetary restraints.

SOLUTION

Federated single sign-on.
Move staff and students to Office 365.
Integrate workstation logins.

RESULT

Enhanced customer experience.
Improved efficiencies, security & compliance.
Lower IT costs.

TECHNOLOGY

PingFederate
IAM Managed Service

Download Customer Success Story

CHALLENGE

The university wanted to provide the best IT customer experience without compromising operational standards but with budgetary restraints.

The University of Gloucestershire has been offering high quality education to students from all over the world for over 170 years. To meet the challenge of improving its position whilst dealing with increased competition and budgetary constraints, the university embarked on several IT projects with the aim to provide the best possible customer experience without compromising operational standards. The university realized that federated authentication and single sign-on services delivered on a resilient platform were key considerations. It also recognized that it would need choose a single solution that would maintain its standards, without affecting the level of customer experience it had set out to achieve. Three key objectives emerged:

To provide a resilient platform as the university moved its staff and students to O365.
To replace the current onerous ‘simplified sign-on’ with a SSO experience.
To integrate workstation logins.

SOLUTION

Federated single sign-on. Move staff and students to Office 365. Integrate workstation logins.

Working closely with IAM specialist ProofID, who had been supporting the university’s IAM deployment for many years they identified PingFederate® by Ping Identity, the market leading identity security company, as the ideal solution. To facilitate the deployment of these technologies across the University, ProofID also arranged to provide a fully hosted IAM Managed Service.
By choosing PingFederate, ProofID could replace the university’s shibboleth service, which was being used to access a substantial number of library resources. They were also able to extend the SSO capabilities of PingFederate to accommodate a range of applications including: Degreeplus, Moodle and Infoserver WAM.

The concerns regarding a resilience platform to ensure continuity of service if the Janet link was unavailable, were addressed by the fully managed service hosted in a Tier-3 UK based data center.