Credit: University of Western Australia
IT services provider Insight Enterprises Australia has enhanced the University of Western Australia's (UWA) identity and access management (IAM) system, moving 60,000 mailboxes over to Office 365.
A long-standing technology partner of the University, Insight implemented an IAM solution based on the Microsoft Office 365 platform and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) for both staff and students.
During the project, which took place during January this year, Insight was able to migrate 60,000 identities and mailboxes from both on-premise and the Google suite over to Office 365.
Multi-factor authentication and self-service password reset options were also rolled out to all staff and students as part of the project, with the latter group having to go through an opt-in process to maintain security.
Further, Insight introduced a zero trust approach for security, which has been adopted by UWA as part of its Network Access Control strategy.
When a user logs into the new Office 365 system, they can access Microsoft collaboration tools and other on-premises, university provided applications, as well as other third-party applications.
Due to Insight’s past experience providing similar overhauls with other universities, Warwick Calkin, CIO of UWA, said its past experience meant it was a good fit for this project.
“Insight’s knowledge of technology and their understanding of how we intended to use the technology delivered success for UWA,” Calkin said.
“One of the biggest concerns for the students was that they may lose some of their historical mail. But no one lost anything, there was not one person who lost any data and there were 60,000 mailboxes involved. We have had nothing but positive feedback on the project.
“The students are also well aware of the benefits of using Microsoft applications as they provide the collaboration skills for the modern workplace."
Previously, the university had a legacy and outdated environment with 17 schools, each with their own IT team, according to Calkin, with user personas being almost localised and determined by the local school.
”So a student ID might have 30+ attributes where only 10 attributes might be common to another faculty,” he said.
“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.”
