Back to school: Navigating the rising Identity security challenges in higher education

As students return to campus and activities ramp up with classes, alumni activities, and campus events, Identity security and management take center stage in ensuring a welcoming yet secure environment for college and university communities.

With millions of students heading back to school, colleges and universities are grappling with offering seamless and secure technology solutions in an ecosystem where their users are at different stages in their relationships with the college and technology. 

Identity management in higher education is inherently complex, yet it’s inextricably tied to issues of security, efficiency, and student experience. 

Schools must invest in delivering frictionless digital experiences delivered in one platform for simplified administration.

675 respondents to the Great State Education Digital Experience report in 2022 said they expected their school’s digital experience to match the standards set by industry leaders like Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix. Meanwhile, 81% expect these digital experiences to extend beyond their time at the institution, which can be done using Okta.

Okta’s neutral and rapidly integrated Identity management platform will elevate your user experience and improve IT service levels for less cost while empowering educational institutions to provide the right services, to the right user, at the right time. This strategic approach to breaking down the complexity of Identity management consists of a cloud-based platform that satisfies the needs of users and IT services within your IT ecosystems.

Secure and frictionless access improves the users’ digital experiences via single sign-on with adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA) while providing IT administrators with access to capabilities that allow a unified approach to Identity security and management of all capabilities that your users expect to experience.

Let's start with the students' user experience with Okta’s Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution, our Customer Identity Cloud. They shouldn’t be concerned with technical infrastructure and obtaining their user IDs or access to necessary applications that support their daily activities.

Instead, their focus should be on adapting to new curriculums, making new friends, adjusting to new environments and teachers, and navigating their new schedules. Students expect the technology to work properly and securely. When technology introduces friction into students’ learning environment, students are less likely to engage and more likely to withdraw.

Okta enables the frictionless and secure user experience students expect and need. From ushering in potential applicants to guiding students through the entire lifecycle, from application to alumni, this process is currently complex and manual. But Okta’s neutrality and integration help security admins cut through the complexity seamlessly with legacy systems, leveraging the power of APIs and taking advantage of orchestration and automation.

More than 12,600 students from over 100 countries attend the University of Notre Dame, and with nearly 50 international study programs, it’s truly a global institution. Additionally, 5,590 faculty and staff work at the university, all dedicated to fostering student development.

Notre Dame needed to provide a secure, seamless user experience to prospective and current students,  faculty, staff, donors, and alumni. Their cloud infrastructure was growing, and operational efficiency and exposure to data breaches were becoming challenges within its legacy systems. The team recognized their opportunity to modernize their approach to Identity management.

Notre Dame selected Okta for Education as the solution that could provide greater insight into the university’s daily activities, verify that users were who they said they were (authentication), and ensure they only had access to resources they needed (authorization). Okta provided the capabilities to reduce the burden of account provisioning workloads (Workflows), centralized user repository across all lifecycle stages (Universal Directory and Lifecycle Management), and provided real-time continuous monitoring and security reporting (Identity Threat Protection).

This is a great example of how education portals represent just one aspect of an institution's digital offerings. Today’s higher education institutions have needs extending to athletics and apparel storefronts, sporting event ticket sites, enrollment portals, healthcare services, donor sites, and more.  Centralizing the management of these identities, as with the Notre Dame use case, helps consolidate or eliminate the proliferation of credentials, login pages, and registration sites that can open a larger attack surface for the IT staff to protect while also causing end-user confusion.

Next, let’s talk about college and university employees and Okta Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC).  These employees must be able to support different operating environments, from remote learning, research, and working to the classroom or institution offices. All these environments require frictionless, secure sign-on experiences — from any location possible.

By meeting user expectations, institutions can enhance their attractiveness to prospective students and faculty. They can also pave the way for improved operational efficiency and data security, allowing everyone to focus on what really matters: education.

Expanding on the use case noted above, Notre Dame seamlessly and successfully deployed Okta Workforce Identity Cloud Single-Sign On (SSO) and Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) in 48 hours to over 18,000 users.

Okta Workforce Identity Cloud solves the inherently complex challenges within an institution’s IT infrastructure through a unified platform for IAM.

To help you address the evolving Identity needs of your institution, review the list below for common requirements that have helped our higher education customers achieve success in modernizing and securing their Identity solutions and programs:

1. Frictionless user experience: Research shows 83% of consumers abandon purchases or account setups because of complex login processes. For example, Okta’s Universal Login offers various authentication and registration options, including social logins like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Discord. This simplifies the sign-up process and provides immediate access to resources while gradually collecting user insights.
2. Connect to any resource: Unification of authentication and sign-ups for all internal and external offerings under a single roof, creating a seamless entry point for every type of user, is essential. Your IAM provider should support open standards and protocols, making it easy to consolidate access to various resources and integrate with existing user directories.
3. Resiliency and security: Having a single platform that supports your Workforce and Customer Identity while ensuring that your users can access your resources 24/7 while scaling automatically during peak periods, like the start of the school year. It also should prioritize security, offering MFA and adaptive MFA protections to protect against account takeover.
4. Better together: One unified solution that has pre-built integrations with existing internal Identity authentication and authorization solutions, allowing staff, faculty, and students to access internal and external resources with one official institution account. This simplifies access and enhances the digital experience for users.

As your users become accustomed to streamlined access in their daily digital interactions, they naturally expect the same from their educational institutions. Unifying your approach to Identity can help close the security gaps created in today’s fragmented systems, and that’s what Okta is providing and can provide to your institution along with a seamless omnichannel experience that takes your customers from mobile to the classroom.

For more information on how Okta could help you become more secure and reduce costs while expanding your digital services, please contact us. We’re focused on helping you maximize Identity as a strategic driver for your success.