Flinders Uni solves password fatigue with Okta partner

Melbourne-based identity management provider Identity Solutions has helped Flinders University solve its identity problem for 55,000 users moving to cloud-based vendor Okta.

The uni needed to improve its online services in a way to consolidate applications, decrease online service support requests for password recovery, integrate with existing systems and new cloud services, efficiently deal with large numbers of users and improve security monitoring practices.

Aaron Finnis, Flinders University associate director, information security and risk, said: "Identity Solutions provided a lot of advice during the initial planning stages."

Flinders University purchased Okta in May and started the deployment in early July.

"Identity Solutions brought their knowledge of the product and the fact that they've rolled out to other organisations. We've got a lot of complexities and we needed our local staff to work closely and that relationship worked quite well," Finnis said.

The university had different technologies in place, which improved availability but led to an inconsistent user experience. The new solution would have to be able to deal with the 5000 new students Flinders receives every year.

Flinders chose Okta for its "simplicity and speed of deployments".

Students now can activate in two clicks and calls for forgotten passwords has dropped by 70 percent. Okta Lifecycle Management automates the process of granting and taking away access to apps based on the user’s role at the university.

The initial roll out had eight core applications registered on the first day. Flinders manages 250 applications and has already moved 25 percent to the cloud. Office 365 provisioning and licensing assignment are fully automated.

Finnis said there was also a visibility problem on the security side.

"There was this inability to work out what was being used, where people were logging in from, because we had too many different technologies logging people in," he said.

Now, the university has automated emails sent to users that may have had their accounts compromised and an enforced password policy.

Identity Solutions was established in 1999 and were the first Australian resellers to become an Okta partner in 2014.

Okta was founded in 2009 by two former Salesforce executives, Frederic Kerrest and Todd McKinnon. The cloud company started the Australian operations in 2014 and has three types of partners: the reseller, the referral and the implementation level of partnership.