Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Moves Identity Management to the Cloud to Accelerate Provisioning, Enhance Flexibility, and Improve System Security
 
 

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Moves Identity Management to the Cloud to Accelerate Provisioning, Enhance Flexibility, and Improve System Security

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Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the world’s largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace, offers more than 30 degree programs in its colleges of Arts and Sciences, Aviation, Business, and Engineering. The university educates more than 35,000 students annually in undergraduate and graduate programs at residential campuses in Prescott, Arizona and Daytona Beach, Florida, through a worldwide campus at more than 150 locations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Canada, and the Middle East, and through online learning.

Each term, Embry-Riddle’s primary customers—its students—become more geographically diverse, engaged in learning at distant locations around the globe at all hours of the day. It is essential that the university provide highly available identity systems to ensure its students can securely access the systems and resources they need at any time.

The university also wanted to improve self-service offerings, place access control into the hands of business users, and strengthen business continuity and security across the organization. Embry-Riddle worked with Oracle Partner Savvis to deploy next-generation Oracle identity management solutions in a cloud-based environment, taking advantage of flexible account provisioning and access management functionality to meet these needs. The team deployed the solutions and migrated 70,000 accounts in just six months.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

  • “Oracle’s identity management suite provides us with the agility and flexibility needed to support our geographically diverse students who are accessing a variety of university services and systems—which are also geographically diverse—within a seamless, stable, and secure environment.” – Eric Fisher, Director of Middleware and Web Services, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

  • Support an increasingly geographically dispersed student population by providing highly available identity systems that enable students to securely access the university systems and resources they need at any time
  • Improve self-service offerings for customers and place control for access to business data into the hands of business owners
  • Provide better control for access, permissions, and enrollments into various student administration applications with seamless single sign-on capabilities
  • Improve business continuity and strengthen system security across the university
  • Move to a cloud-hosted model to minimize the time and expense involved in upgrading and maintaining on-premise hardware and data centers, as well as to eliminate the risk for data loss in natural-disaster-prone Florida

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed the 11g version of Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Internet Directory, and Oracle Identity Federation to take advantage of next-generation account provisioning and access management functionality, enabling Embry-Riddle to improve business role modeling, auditing, and approval
  • Deployed Oracle’s identity management applications on a hosted model with Savvis, migrating 70,000 accounts and going live in just six months
  • Improved account provisioning speed, moving Embry-Riddle closer to real-time provisioning
  • Allowed business data owners to manage and maintain student information, as well as reset passwords—accelerating the role creation process and reducing calls into IT
  • Enabled the university to process 4,000 to 5,000 account changes each day, due to automated and requested changes
  • Implemented Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Federation to more easily extend single sign-on to at least 15 to 20 active applications—including Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions—for improved customer satisfaction
  • Leveraged Oracle Identity Federation to eliminate the need for custom programming when bringing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering onto single sign-on, reducing the time needed to onboard a new application from up to three weeks to as little as one hour
  • Improved control over accounts, enabling the university to, for example, change a password in one central location if an employee leaves the organization rather than needing to go into multiple systems to make the change
  • Enhanced security with greater reporting functionality in the 11g systems—which provides Embry-Riddle with greater visibility into access granted to various university systems
  • Leveraged the flexibility and scalability of a clustered Oracle WebLogic Server on a virtualized cloud platform to allow rapid, easy growth as utilization increases
  • Improved business continuity and disaster recovery options through deployment in the cloud environment

Why Oracle

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University has been an Oracle Fusion Middleware customer for years. The university decided to move to the 11g version of its identity management solutions to take advantage of their new role management functionality—which enabled enhanced business role modeling and improved auditing and approval of roles. 

“We are very pleased we went with the 11g versions of our identity management applications. They provide the foundation for a better future in our technology roadmap,” saidEric Fisher, director of middleware and Web services, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Partner

Embry-Riddle decided to move its identity management systems to a hosted model with Oracle Partner Savvis.

“Savvis did not miss a step. Within eight weeks of signing the contract, they had the servers up and running, and within six months they had deployed the new identity management systems and migrated 70,000 accounts,” Fisher said.   

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