From days to minutes – university drastically reduces identity hassles

[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Mohammad Fayaz. I'm the IT Applications Manager here at Canadian University of Dubai. My role here is to manage the core applications that we have as well their security. Canadian University of Dubai offers Canadian curriculum-based education. Dubai is a multicultural city. In terms of our student population, we have over 100 nationalities on campus. So this is truly representing the Canadian standards. All of our faculty and staff are Canadian trained, so this brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise from North America to this region. Because we are located in Dubai, the majority of our faculty and staff are ex-pats. So therefore, during the summer, they go back home. And then when they do return in September, it's actually them returning, plus all of the students. And that actually created huge bottlenecks in the IT department for us, because a lot of the faculty and staff would either have forgotten their passwords, the students would have also forgotten their passwords. Security is more critical than ever, because as you're aware, there's a lot of companies that are being hacked. And data, right now, is the new wealth. We need to protect the brand identity. We need to protect the students' data, because we hold a lot of student information. And we are responsible for protecting that data from internal and external threats. One of the issues that we're having is, we have so many different systems that are used in different departments, but there is no central way of managing the security, the roles, and the provisioning of accounts. It's time consuming for us to provision all of the accounts in the different systems and then track them to ensure that they don't have any sort of role creep, meaning they don't have any added privileges that might increase the risk. One Identity mitigated some of the risks that we had by providing better visibility and reporting. The One Identity gives us a central repository where we can access and it will identify to us all the permissions that are assigned in all of the different systems. So having the benefit of identity management, it really helped us save time in terms of the turnaround time for a password reset, for provisioning accounts, for security management. We were able to centralize those and streamline them to bring them down from an average of 24 to 48 hours resolution time down to five minutes. We were able to configure the password manager to communicate with our SMS gateway. It was fairly seamless. It did not require a lot of effort. And once we had it set up, it worked right out of the box. Your reputation is on the line. And you have to protect that. You don't want to be another statistic that you've been hacked and then your students' enrollment will obviously be affected. So security plays a really important role in the organization. One Identity provided us the confidence and the capability to grow with the product, because the product does not end just with the project's implementation, but it's a constantly evolving in a changing landscape. Security is always changing. We always have to learn to adapt, integrate, and evolve. I feel that One Identity management are very supportive of our security needs. And they are always evolving with us. They're always helping us take it to the next step. [MUSIC PLAYING]