Identity Management and Higher Education
One of the other tracks I have been following at CanHEIT is on identity management. At Quest we care about this quite a bit. Our customers have obvious concerns about security and compliance, as well as significant costs associated with customer, employee, and partner identity.
It probably shouldn’t have surprised me that our institutions of higher learning have significant challenges in this area as well. Each year a large proportion of their student body turns over. Some of them may come back later for more courses. Some may transition to alumni or faculty. Many students take courses at partner institutions, for which credit is granted at their home institution. Finally, universities tend to have extremely heterogeneous computing environments, even more so than industry.
All in all, a fascinating look at a diverse set of challenges I wouldn’t normally see in my day-to-day routine. They will call for a robust set of tools and standards to meet the needs of federation and user-centric identity in a platform-agnostic world. Despite years of work on directory services and single-sign-on, there are still many questions to answer. It’s a very exciting and rapidly evolving problem space.
Many thanks to Jens Haeusser from the University of British Columbia for an informative and enjoyable presentation.
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