The Hidden Costs of Fragmented Identity Systems in Higher Education
It’s almost midnight on a Sunday. A student is locked out of the learning management system the night before a midterm. Her email login works, but her LMS credentials don’t—and no one can explain why.
Meanwhile, an IT administrator elsewhere on campus is manually provisioning a new hire into a dozen systems, copying and pasting data between screens and hoping nothing gets missed.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re daily realities for colleges and universities running fragmented identity and access management (IAM) environments. And while the frustration is obvious, the true cost is far less visible. Fragmented identity systems quietly drain budgets, weaken security, overload IT staff, and create friction that impacts student success.
How Higher Education Got Here
Most institutions didn’t intentionally design fragmented identity systems. They accumulated over time. A student information system was implemented years ago. An HR platform came later. The LMS brought its own authentication layer. Building access, library systems, research platforms, and departmental applications followed, each with its own user store and rules.
The 2025 EDUCAUSE Top 10 captures this reality clearly, describing higher education IT environments as a growing "digital jungle"1 of tools that don’t communicate with one another. Budget constraints compound the issue. When central IT can’t move fast enough, teams rely on custom scripts, databases, and homegrown applications to fill gaps. While effective in the short term, these solutions rarely scale or integrate cleanly.
Over time, institutions inherit brittle integrations, undocumented processes, and a web of dependencies that only a handful of long-tenured staff understand. Identity infrastructure becomes fragile—and increasingly expensive to maintain.
Why the Costs Stay Hidden
What makes fragmented identity systems particularly dangerous is that their costs don’t appear on a single budget line. Security incidents show up as risk. Help desk tickets show up as staffing strain. Unused SaaS licenses are absorbed into departmental budgets. Student frustration appears later as enrollment and retention challenges.
In fact, financial exposure extends well beyond the obvious. As SaaS adoption accelerates, unmanaged identities create compounding costs. Notably, large organizations spend an average of $4,800 per employee per year on SaaS2, with 25–30% of licenses unused or forgotten3. In higher education, unmanaged identities directly contribute to this waste.
Identity as Infrastructure
In higher education, identity is often treated as plumbing—important but invisible unless something breaks. In reality, it’s foundational infrastructure. Identity determines who gets access, when they get it, how long they keep it, and how confidently institutions can answer questions from auditors and regulators.
As cyber threats rise and compliance expectations tighten, fragmented identity systems become harder to justify. Platforms like RapidIdentity—part of the Jamf portfolio—are designed specifically to help higher education institutions establish a unified identity foundation.
Learn how a unified identity foundation can reduce risk, cost, and friction across your institution. Request a Demo today!
This is the first in a 5 part series about Identity and Access Management in Higher Education. In our next post, learn how fragmented IAM systems increase security breach and compliance risk.
1 EDUCAUSE. "2025 EDUCAUSE Top 10." October 2024. https://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/research/top-10-it-issues-technologies-and-trends/2025
2 https://zylo.com/reports/2025-saas-management-index/
3 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for SaaS Management Platforms, May 2025.
Bryan Christ is an IT professional with almost three decades of industry experience. He has worked for a number of high-profile companies including Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and MediaFire. After serving two years in a fractional CIO role in the Greater Houston area, Bryan shifted into the identity and access management (IAM) arena and has spent the last several years focused on Higher Education.