Abu Dhabi University automates access management with Identity Manager, giving new students and staff access to applications fast and helping to dramatically reduce help-desk enquiries.
Abu Dhabi University is a thriving centre for higher education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It runs faculties for law, arts and sciences, engineering and business administration — all of which offer undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Demand for places is high, with applicants coming not just from the UAE, but around the world.
The university faced significant challenges around access management. There were delays in giving new students access to the university applications they required. In addition, because the entire process was manual, de-provisioning students at the end of their courses wasn’t instant. This left the university open to risk as students who had left still had active accounts. It wasn’t just students who were affected. New staff didn’t always get access to what they needed straightaway. Shabeer Mangattuparambil, Senior IT Manager at Abu Dhabi University, says: “It could take up to three days or more to provide a student or member of staff with access to the systems they required. In the first weeks of an academic year, we could receive hundreds of help-desk requests from new students saying they still couldn’t reach their applications.”
The university engaged with longstanding technology partner Exceed IT to find a solution. Exceed IT proposed One Identity Manager, and provided Shabeer and other key stakeholders with a demonstration. Says Shabeer: “The demonstration and a small proof of concept that followed showed the wide range of capabilities within Identity Manager for access control and governance. What’s more, we saw that we could phase the implementation of Identity Manager, automating access first and then implementing the governance features later.”
“Students quickly gain access to the applications they need. The number of help-desk inquiries at the start of the academic year has fallen significantly because access management is no longer an issue,” says Shabeer.
