Enabling IAM for University Students During Onset of COVID-19

Executive Summary

This client is a revered four-year university in North Carolina. They have over 5,000 students enrolled, and had shifted primarily to online course due to the pandemic. Due to the size and complexity of their institution, and the onset of COVID-19 causing nearly all courses to move to online learning, they needed to be able to ensure student accounts were secure and be able to manage access and identity. One of the most important of these services is Database services. This organization needed to efficiently and securely support rapid and ongoing user growth. If this data isn't managed properly, there is enormous potential for loss of user satisfaction and content availability. With Amazon EKS and EC2, our client gained a modern and robust set of tools that allow them to easily and reliably scale as needed. Additionally, using a combination of DynamoDB, RDS, and Cloundfront, increasing user growth and content streaming was easy and efficient. 

The Business Need

Given the amount of students at this university, they needed a better way to ensure that students' emails and accounts were secure when utilizing the institutions resources having previously used a different authentication application. The rapid onset of COVID-19 in 2020 required a quick turnaround on an authentication service that could adapt to such a large student body. 

The Solution

We implemented Okta, an IAM tool that enforces Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) as well as Single Sign-On (SSO) to simplify and secure the login process for this institution. 

The Result

This institution now has an extra layer of security surrounding their students' accounts, ensuring that their resources stay safe and secure through an easy-to-use and manage application. 

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