Streamlined UX and reduced IT admin costs for a higher education institution

A leading private university was receiving frequent complaints from its students due to the legacy login process for accessing their applications.

The Challenge

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Students needed to access multiple university applications, each with separate login credentials.

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Passwords were frequently forgotten or confused between applications, resulting in a large number of support calls to recover passwords.

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Students were often unable to register for courses on time at the start of semesters due to passwords forgotten during term breaks, resulting in a poor user experience (UX), and even more support calls.

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With over 3000 users and 10+ applications, the number of credentials for the IT admin team to create and manage was very large.

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User accounts were often created with weak default passwords which were not changed by users, resulting in security gaps.

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There was also a tendency for students to set simple passwords that were easy to remember but also easily compromised, which further increased security risks.

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Access security was an increasingly high priority for the university as student strength and the volume of personal data under management increased each year.

SOLUTION

Akku’s Solution

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  • A single sign-on was implemented across all of the university’s applications.
  • A self-service system for password creation and recovery was rolled out for all of the university’s users.
  • Password policies were enforced to ensure the use of stronger passwords.
  • Multi-factor authentication was deployed to provide an additional layer of security to the authentication process.

Real-world Outcomes

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With the self-service Akku Password Manager, users now set their own passwords, eliminating the security risk of default passwords.

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Users can also change or recover passwords themselves. This has eliminated support requests for password assistance completely, and reduced IT admin time on support functions by as much as 80%.

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Users now need to remember just one set of credentials, and log in to Akku just once. With Akku SSO & IdP, all of the university’s applications are accessible from a single dashboard with a single click, greatly enhancing the students’ user experience. This is borne out by higher satisfaction scores in surveys held after the implementation of Akku.

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The greatly reduced number of credentials to be created, managed, and deleted on exit have freed up two team members from IT admin to focus on more productive tasks.

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A strong password policy has also been enforced with Akku Password Manager to ensure that users set standards compliant passwords that are difficult for hackers to crack.

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The risk of security breaches has been significantly reduced with the implementation of Akku’s Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication, with OTP-based authentication reinforcing user passwords during the login process.

By deploying Akku, our client was able to comprehensively, quickly and cost-effectively address each of their key challenges.