For us here at Identity Automation, we witnessed amazing growth in the education tech sector this year. It’s been quite a ride... from North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction’s roll out of its cloud entity platform to our irrefutable support of the Student Privacy Pledge.

Last week I wrote a post explaining the details of single sign-on, commonly referred to as SSO. I discussed what it is, what it means, how it’s used and why it’s valuable. But today, why don’t we look at the opposite side of the spectrum - what life would be like without SSO. It’s an interesting question to consider because so many companies now utilize SSO, but it wasn’t too long ago that this was our reality.

As educational apps continue to rise in popularity in school districts across the country, educational technology administrators find themselves inundated. Just as quickly as IT can clear new applications for use, new ones crop up in classrooms - often without passing an IT review. This is the current state of the freemium application model in education, and it’s one that is creating a perpetual tug of war between teaching staffs and school technology departments.

If you work in the IT department or have contact with colleagues who do, you have most likely heard the term “single sign-on” (SSO). While it seems like a straight-forward description of a login technique, I’ve heard people describe it in a number of different ways.

During every school year, faculty members resign, students graduate and staff are terminated. However, when a student or an employee leaves the school, who makes sure their accounts are deactivated and deleted?

News of a school district grappling with the security pitfalls of access management made headlines recently and it caught our eye. According to ZDNet, when Bearden Middle School in Knoxville, Tennessee issued new iPads to their students as part of the national iPads for Kids Program, they had few options at their disposal for securing them.

First off, what is an Orphan account?

Orphan accounts are the accounts that have somehow slipped past the de-provisioning paper trail.  Those accounts that still have organizational access to systems without a valid owner.  

Identity Automation will be hosting the second of the four webinar series with Carahsoft on Thursday, August 6. Next week’s topic will discuss some of the best practices and guidelines all schools can follow to ensure their identity management system is keeping up with the recent advances in educational technology.

In case you weren’t able to attend the Identity Automation sponsored, Texas CTO 2015 Summer Clinic in Austin, TX, or if you missed the keynote speaker, Mark Strama, Head of Google Fiber Operations in Austin, TX, we’re here to bring you some highlights and lessons learned!

When the public school system of Minnetonka, Minnesota, came to us to help implement a new Identity Automation Management system, they had very specific needs - and many of them. They had an infrastructure that no longer suited their needs and was technologically unwieldy, so they turned to us to provide an easy-to-manage, secure IAM platform for over 10,000 students in grades K-12 and their educators. We not only met their expectations, but exceeded them.