[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Sonja Vanala and I work in Laurea University of Applied Sciences. I work as an IAM designer. Laurea University is a University of Applied Sciences in the Southern part of Finland, mostly in the Metropolitan area. Also, we have six campuses together and three of them are in the Metropolitan area and three of them are like 50 or 70 kilometers away. The newest risks for universities is the student mobility because we have students all across the globe, and we have to make sure that they are who they say they are when they come to study. We started looking for identity governance solution because we were coming to an end with our old service provider, and our old system was at the end of its life. So as a public sector, universities are required to make a competition with the requirements we had.
The main reason we ended up choosing One Identity was the variety of features it offered. It was the best match for our requirements, and it had a lot of new features that we didn't have earlier before. Before One Identity Manager, we used the provision of user accounts from two different sources, the students and the staff. And we did that through Active Directory once per day. And now with One Identity Manager, we do that same-- we still have two sources, but we can provision them once per hour so that's a lot faster.
The main benefits that we've seen with One Identity Manager, that is the speed, that we can provision once per hour. And when we have a student who is taking part on a class, their identity will be ready in less than two hours with all the accounts they need so that's a huge plus. We do have 22,000 student identities so it makes it a lot faster to provision like 300 or 500 identities compared to the last system we had that it took almost four hours daily by nighttime to make all the accounts.
One of the other benefits for One Identity Manager is that we can offer self-service for our users, the students and the staff. Before One Identity, we had all the users contact service desk for different things and now we can offer them IT shop and it's not dependent on the opening hours of service desk. We are working with a One Identity partner in Finland, and they are providing us the backend and server side and we, as a customer, we are responsible for all the data side of things. The main systems we have to govern access to and the data we have to govern access to would be our student registry, which holds all the student data, all their grades and studies, and of course, their personal data. And the other main systems would be our business and finance systems, which hold all the key elements to run a University of Applied Sciences.
When we start onboarding an application, we usually set up a workshops with the process owners and the product owners of that specific system, and we discuss their processes and make sure that we are all on the same page with how user accounts and accesses are provisioned. And then we usually make sure that all of our documentation is on time and on point, and we make sure that all the access rights are modeled correctly in the endpoint. And then, from that, we start the technical side of things. We are just starting to implement our attestation projects to different accesses and different systems. And we will be deciding on, depending on the system, like quarterly or once a year type of certification, that everything is correct and everyone is having the right access rights.
I think the main thing that I've learned during my journey with identity and access management is to maintain good relationships with the rest of the organization and get to the people behind the critical business systems. The One Identity Manager offers a great deal of connectors to different systems. As in education field, you have a lot of different platforms, so that's a huge thing. And of course it offers complex role management because we all know we have different identities and different kind of users in our systems. So this is my first time in participating in Unite, and I'm blown away with all the nice sessions with good speakers and getting to know and seeing other peoples in other fields and discussing all the same problems that we all have and hearing how they've solved different things. And it's been great.
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