CITY OF SUNDERLAND COLLEGE TURNS TO NEC PHILIPS FOR IDENTITY MANAGEMENT PROJECT
- College rolls out Identity Management technology to 3,000 desktops and 15,000 students and staff on mixed network of Microsoft and Novell technology -
City of Sunderland College, one of the largest further education and sixth form colleges in the country, has partnered with NEC Unified Solutions to implement a new Identity Management solution, utilising Novell Identity Management technology. The solution, which synchronises data from a mixed Microsoft and Novell infrastructure, will authenticate and manage staff and student access across the College’s five campuses spread throughout Sunderland.
With over 3,000 desktops and 15,000 full and part-time students at City of Sunderland College, all accessing the network on a daily basis, it was clear that if the college was to continue to provide the speed and level of service required for staff and students, it needed to streamline its provisioning of user identities and accounts.
As Dave Ritchie, IT services manager explains, “The College has traditionally worked on a combination of different technology platforms for staff and students, which has added an element of complexity to the identity and access management process. As we continue to grow we realised that we needed to streamline our Identity Management activities in order to improve communications and accessibility without compromising security.
Dave continues, “The solution which was proposed and deployed by NEC, is a single identity management vault which synchronises information from the Microsoft Active Directory and the Novell eDirectory. The system is capable of storing the details of over 30,000 individual identity accounts and because it is all in a single environment, we will be able to provision students and staff accounts quicker, providing them with faster access to the relevant core systems and applications, as well as being able to roll out new services quickly and easily in the future.”
Continuing Dave explains, “In addition to the provisioning of accounts, the new solution simplifies the process of disabling accounts when people leave, reducing the threat of security breaches of our infrastructure. The College also has to retain information on students’ accounts for up to two years after they have finished their courses, so information cannot be deleted. However, it is important that students that leave us have their accounts disabled.”
Speaking about the project, Dave states, “We knew that the implementation process was going to be technically complicated which is why we looked for a technology supplier that had both Microsoft and Novell capabilities and credentials. NEC met these criteria and could also demonstrate a strong track record in Identity Management systems. At every stage of the implementation process NEC gave us confidence that they were in complete control of the project and were on schedule to meet our implementation timeframes. Critically, the system was rolled out with minimal disruption to our day-to-day operations.”
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