“Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.” - Knute Rockne, legendary Notre Dame football coach.
Since joining Identity Automation in 2011, I’ve seen the company grow significantly and embrace major technological change. From consulting to software development and from implementation to support, we’ve evolved into what we are today - a leader in identity and access management for education, K-12 and Higher Education.
RapidIdentity, our world-class identity and access management (IAM) platform, streamlines IAM into an easy and user-friendly environment used by hundreds of K-12 school districts and colleges throughout North America - even internationally. However, before we created RapidIdentity, we were already experts in identity access management for educational environments.
Of course, back then, it was painful and frustrating to implement an IAM system. A large school district wanted to implement an IAM solution to authenticate users based on their status in the school’s Active Directory (AD). The problem was, we couldn't accurately transfer the data and have it communicate efficiently with their IAM system. The solutions that were available at the time made this nearly impossible to do without spending massive amounts of money; money the district didn't have. This contributed to the development of RapidIdentity.
Integration limitations meant that K-12 IT departments were faced with an inordinate amount of work just to manage user accounts. Years ago, I worked with a district that had to manually delete and update user accounts each time their status in HR changed. This was a headache, especially at the beginning of the school year. Manually provisioning new students, teachers and staff for post-project updates, adjustments, or changes tended to overwhelm the IT department. At the time, no publicly available solution could solve their problem in a way that was also cost-effective.
Over the years, I can think of plenty of examples just like these. Finally, enough was enough; we were sick of providing stop-gap measures and wanted to create a comprehensive solution that would make life significantly easier for our customers. So, we took Knute Rockne’s advice, identified the strengths and weaknesses of our current systems, then designed a new system that had their strengths, but none of the weaknesses.
The result was RapidIdentity. RapidIdentity was built with the user experience foremost in mind, and focuses on giving our customers a flexible and complete IAM product that reduces the IT workload, while at the same time allowing for better service levels. One of our customers, the New Caney School District, reports that after switching to RapidIdentity, they manage ten times as many users in just 20% of the time! This freed their IT staff up to focus on important things such as critical strategic initiatives. Talk about doing more with less!
As I said before, I have seen many changes to Identity Automation over the years but the one thing I am most proud of is that no matter what, we have maintained our passion for making school districts a better place for both staff and students. At Identity Automation, we realize that we exist to provide K-12 districts with the best IAM solution possible, and that doing so has a direct impact on the quality of education.
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