Case Study: Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake Central School District

Industry: Pre-K–12

Solutions: RapidID Cloud Lifecycle Management, Jamf Apple Device Management

Outcome: By implementing RapidID and integrating HR, Google Workspace, Jamf, and Verkada, Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake Central School District reduced onboarding time from several days to just a day in most cases, significantly improved operational efficiency, and strengthened security through automated access management. 

The district now provisions digital and physical access accurately and consistently—without adding administrative burden—creating a smoother experience for employees and a safer environment for students and staff.

“When you watch someone go from not being hired to being onboarded, to having all the assets, the resources, and the correct level of access that they need within a day or two max, that's where people have that ‘aha!’ moment [and] understand what the value is of automating a lot of the processes that used to be all manual,” said Michael Steinberg, Assistant Director of Cybersecurity and Information Systems.

BH-BL CSD serves approximately 3,200 students with a staff of 800 employees across 10 buildings. As the district modernized its technology and security environment, leaders recognized identity and access management—particularly onboarding and physical access—as a critical opportunity to improve efficiency, accuracy, and safety.

CHALLENGE

Before automation, identity and access management at BH-BL CSD was disjointed and heavily manual. Onboarding new employees required IT staff to manage a steady stream of tickets for licenses, group memberships, communications access, and building entry. As staff changed roles or left, access updates were difficult to maintain at scale.

“The process was arduous, and sometimes it could take months before the person got added to all the right products,” Steinberg said. “We were trying to basically coordinate with each administrator for each product to make sure that they were doing their part. It just was wildly inefficient.”

Many of the district’s systems had been purchased years earlier and were not designed to integrate with one another. Lacking APIs or automation capabilities, they forced IT to rely on one-off decisions rather than a consistent policy. This approach did not scale for BH-BL CSD’s evolving organization.

SOLUTION

Working closely with HR and other departments, the district’s IT leadership mapped access to clearly defined job roles, departments, and buildings—creating identity profiles before onboarding new employees.

“We basically built a vernacular with our HR department that everyone agreed on [...] so that when we need to talk about access for each individual the organization, that we were all speaking the same language,” said Doug Carlton, Director of Technology.

RapidID became the bridge between HR and the rest of the district’s systems. When HR enters a new hire with a job title, building, and start date, RapidID automatically creates the user’s identity, provisions Google Workspace access, assigns group memberships, and triggers appropriate physical access permissions.

“[HR] puts the right job title in, the right building, and then we do the rest,” Steinberg said. “I like to use the word, ‘automagically.’”

The district also worked closely with Verkada to automate door access using Google Groups. BH-BL CSD became the first organization globally to deploy a Google Group-based connector that assigns door access dynamically based on identity data managed by RapidID.

Carlton still remembers the moment his team assigned a test badge to a user, immediately placed the badge on the door, and the door popped open.

“That's just kind of a cool moment,” Carlton said. “It's such a simple thing, but to do it in a way that is going to be secure and logical and sound, it just takes so much—and then you finally get there and you walk through the door, proverbially and literally.”

Jamf played a critical role by aligning Apple devices with user identities. Identity Automation’s flexibility allowed the district to extract and normalize data from a legacy HR system that otherwise resisted integration.

“Barring myself or one of our guys rolling up our sleeves and getting really good at scripting overnight, and figuring out how to make all this data make sense, there would have been no way to overcome that hurdle,” Steinberg said. “Any of the things that we’re doing with our groups, it just wouldn’t be possible.”

RESULTS

By implementing RapidID, BH-BL CSD quickly moved from manual, reactive processes to a scalable and secure operating model. The results include:

• Dramatically Faster Onboarding: Onboarding times dropped from several days to just one day or less in most cases. New employees typically receive proper access to email, systems, and buildings well before their first day.
  
  
• Improved Operational Efficiency: Previously, onboarding each employee required at least an hour of manual IT effort across multiple systems. Automation significantly reduced this workload, especially during peak hiring periods.
  
  
• Better End-user Experience: Employees now arrive on day one with working accounts and badges, and IT receives far fewer complaints about missing access or disjointed systems.
  
  
• Stronger, More Granular Security: The district moved from approximately 18 broad, department-based groups to about 160 highly specific, role-based groups—enabling precise, policy-driven access that would have been impossible to manage manually.

The district significantly reduced operational and security risk by eliminating manual access decisions and enforcing consistent policies. Automated provisioning ensures that access is granted based on authoritative HR data, reducing the likelihood of over-provisioned accounts, missed role change updates, or delayed access removal.

“We can get hypergranular with our access now because we are automating,” Steinberg said. “If you’re not automating as an organization, you’re not going to get hypergranular [...] so what you end up doing is one-size-fits-all solutions for everything because that's all you can manage.”

With automated, role-based provisioning in place, the district can confidently scope access, respond quickly to role changes, and support advanced security scenarios such as lockdowns.

“We used to get a lot of feedback about things being janky and disjointed,” Carlton said. “We don’t hear about that as much anymore. It’s a little bit of, ‘No news is good news,’ I think.”

BH-BL CSD now onboards staff faster, manages access more accurately, and strengthens security without adding operational burden—creating a safer, more agile environment for students, staff, and administrators alike.

Both leaders stress that successful identity automation starts long before technology implementation.

“Most of the work that needs to be done is not technical. It’s having the conversations with your leadership and HR department,” Steinberg said. “Start conceptualizing what it would look like to have a profile-based approach to access.”

Carlton agreed, emphasizing the importance of auditing and cleaning up HR system data. “You really have to do the dirty work. The only way out is through.”