Client story UWA: A single platform for identity, access and remote learning outcomes

Facts at a glance

Client industry:

Higher Education

Challenge: 

The client looked to remove inefficiencies and improve user experience whilst moving to remote learning capabilities.

Solution:

• Complex identity and access management consolidation
• Migration of 60,000 identities and mailboxes
• Multi-factor Authentication and self-service password reset
• Zero Trust approach for security
• Microsoft Teams for remote collaboration and online learning

Results:

• Student collaboration and remote learning capability with 3144 course units moved online in 2 weeks
• Identity control consolidated into a ‘single source of truth’ platform
• Streamlined user experience with single sign-on to applications
• Enhanced security 

Solution area:

Insight’s Cloud and Connected Workforce solutions help clients digitally transform their operations to improve user engagement and experience.

Challenge

The University of Western Australia (UWA) has set the ambitious goal of achieving an international ranking in the world Top 50 Universities by 2050. Underpinning this goal, is the University’s Vision 2030: to create the next generation of global leaders through experience-rich education and world-leading, trustworthy research.

To support the vision, UWA looked to overcome the challenges of a disparate technology environment and increasing technical debt, through an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution to remove inefficiencies, improve user experience and accelerate UWA’s digital transformation.

“Unlike a corporate environment where everyone fits into an organisational chart nice and neatly, the university environment doesn’t have those nice clean lines around it. We had a legacy environment where we had 17 schools and each one of those schools had their own IT team. User personas were almost localised, determined by the local school. So a student ID might have 30+ attributes where only 10 attributes might be common to another faculty. Blurring the lines even further is that some users are both staff and students, which meant the parameters around user identity are even more complex,” says Warwick Calkin, CIO, UWA.

With a complex mixture of outdated systems and processes catering for a plethora of identity personas, it was apparent UWA needed a consolidated identity solution and to move into a streamlined environment to improve both staff and student experience.

Solution

Insight was appointed to implement an Identity and Access Management solution (IAM) based on the Microsoft Office 365 platform for both staff and students. Identity control was consolidated into a central, ‘single source of truth’ end-to-end platform, putting in place a trusted environment for future single sign-on to other in-house applications, such as HR, e-learning solutions and third party applications.

The Insight team worked with UWA to deliver a centralised access solution based on Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) - a solution that also took advantage of Microsoft’s enhanced security features such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) conditional access.

The IAM solution also laid the foundation for UWA to rapidly spin up Microsoft Teams through the single O365 platform to support collaboration and online learning in response to the COVID-19 circumstances. Working together, Insight supported UWA’s immediate remote learning initiatives through:

• Deployment of Microsoft Teams to support 3,144 course units.
• Leveraging the Microsoft partnership UWA could take advantage of Azure Labs which has now been extended to more than 2,000 lab sessions across UWA.
• Deployment of business-specific Microsoft Teams groups

“Insight brings the right people to the table at the right time. They make a difference by bringing in-depth knowledge across the Higher Education Sector and the ability to navigate complex IT projects in a far more seamless and elegant way than what we could do on our own,” says Calkin.

Results

By January 2020, all 60,000 identities were successfully mapped and migrated over to the new environment. Now, when a staff member or student logs in to Office 365, they have access to the Microsoft collaboration tools, and can access relevant, on-premises university-provided applications and other third party applications, based on their user persona.

Insight’s blended team approach to working with UWA, helped to demonstrate technical leadership and supported the UWA IT Team with knowledge transfer at all stages of the project, ensuring UWA was well placed to drive business value forward.

UWA is now well on its way to support a modern, online way of learning with a single, extensible platform to help drive digital resilence and deliver learning, research and information sharing ‘beyond borders’. Most importantly, the project has accelerated UWA’s digital roadmap in alignment with its vision and ranking goal to 2030.