Industries — Education

Identity Security for Education

In education, one person is an applicant, then a student, often a worker or researcher, then an alum — and their access has to keep up at every step, for decades, across IT that's spread among colleges and departments. We govern that whole lifecycle, protect student and research data, and help you prove it under FERPA.

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The challenge

One identity, many roles, decades of access

In most sectors, a person joins, holds a job, and leaves. In education, the same identity can be an applicant, a student, a teaching assistant, a researcher, an employee, and an alum — sometimes several at once — and the institution keeps a relationship with them long after they graduate.

Underneath that sits decentralized IT: colleges and departments running their own systems, federated logins to hundreds of applications, shared lab machines, and student records and research data that FERPA and funders expect you to protect. Access changes constantly, and the place it breaks is the transitions.

The lifecycle

Access has to follow people for life

A campus identity rarely starts or ends cleanly. It changes role over years, and every transition is an access change waiting to be missed.

Applicant

Limited, time-boxed access to portals before they ever set foot on campus.

Student

Email, the LMS, library, labs, and registration — scoped to their program and year.

Faculty & staff

Administrative systems, grading, research data, HR — often held alongside a student role.

Alumni

Access that downgrades for life — not left lingering over-privileged, not abruptly cut.

From the day they apply to long after they graduate — the right access at every step.

The approach

How to keep access in step

Move people through every role automatically

We tie provisioning to your SIS and HR systems and grant access by role and program, so access changes the moment someone's status does — applicant to student, student to staff, staff to alum — and handles people who hold several affiliations at once. Access reviews keep it honest, and graduation downgrades access instead of leaving an open account behind. This is our identity governance work.

Protect student records and research data

We vault and monitor the privileged access behind your SIS, research and high-performance computing systems, and the databases that hold FERPA-protected records — bringing the scattered admin accounts across departments under least privilege and session control. This is our privileged access management work.

Bring decentralized IT under one program

Colleges and departments each run their own systems, and that's not going to change. We operate identity centrally across them — keeping federation and single sign-on consistent and the FERPA-relevant controls current — so autonomy doesn't mean fragmented, unprovable access. This is our managed IAM work.

What we secure

From the LMS to the research lab

Across teaching, research, and the identity backbone that connects them.

Teaching & student systems

Student information systems (Banner, PeopleSoft, Workday Student)Learning management (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle)

Research & computing

Research data storesHigh-performance computing clustersGrant & sponsored-research systems

Identity & infrastructure

Active DirectoryMicrosoft Entra IDFederated SSO (Shibboleth / InCommon)Google WorkspaceAWSAzureGCP

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Free audit

See who can reach your student and research data.

Book a free identity security audit — we'll reach out to scope it, review your environment with you, and deliver your findings. No cost, no obligation.

Book a free identity security audit

Higher education

Identity and access management for higher education

Higher education identity management is a different problem from corporate IAM, and treating it the same is why so many university rollouts stall. Every fall, thousands of identities arrive at once — and every one of them changes shape over time. A student becomes a teaching assistant, then a staff member, then an alum with library access and a donor portal login. Corporate IAM assumes one person, one role. A university is one person, five overlapping affiliations, sometimes decades apart.

The lifecycle is the hard part. Student identity management means provisioning whole cohorts on enrollment day, adjusting access as majors, jobs, and research assignments shift mid-term, and pulling it all back at graduation without cutting off what alumni legitimately keep. Faculty identity management adds visiting researchers, adjuncts on term contracts, and emeritus staff who never quite leave. Miss the offboarding and the directory fills with live accounts nobody owns.

Then there's what the access reaches: education records covered by FERPA, international student data under GDPR, and research computing environments where privileged access is the difference between protected IP and a breach disclosure. IAM for higher education has to prove control across all of it — with the lean IT team most institutions actually have.

We deliver that as a program: automated lifecycle provisioning tied to your student information and HR systems, role models built for overlapping affiliations, privileged access controls for research and infrastructure, and the evidence trail your auditors and federal reviewers ask for.

FAQ

What institutions ask first

Can you work with our decentralized, multi-campus IT?

Yes — we govern identity centrally while respecting departmental autonomy, using federation and a shared role model so colleges and departments keep their own systems while access stays consistent and provable across all of them.

How do you handle the surge of students arriving and leaving every term?

By automating the lifecycle end to end. Provisioning runs off your student information system, so whole cohorts get the right access on enrollment day without ticket queues. Mid-term changes — a student becoming a TA, a research assignment, a job in the registrar's office — adjust access automatically as affiliations change. And separation runs on the academic calendar, so access is pulled back at graduation while alumni keep only what they're entitled to. The turnover stops being an IT event.

What should colleges and universities look for in IAM software?

Three things corporate-focused tools get wrong: support for one person holding several overlapping affiliations at once (student, employee, alum), lifecycle automation driven by your student information system rather than an HR feed alone, and federation that works across decentralized campus IT. Platform matters less than the role model — we work with SailPoint, Saviynt, and Microsoft Entra ID, and design for the affiliation problem first.

Do you work with K-12 schools as well as higher education?

Yes. K-12 has the same lifecycle problem on a yearly cycle — students advancing, staff turning over, and student data protected under FERPA — usually with a smaller IT team. We scale the same program down: automated rostering-driven access, simple role models, and controls a lean team can actually run.

How do you help with FERPA?

We focus on the access controls FERPA implies — least-privilege access to education records, logging of who accessed what, and prompt deprovisioning when a role ends — and keep the evidence current, so you can demonstrate it rather than reconstruct it.