Liberal Arts College Partners with SecureAuth for Data Security

  • By Matt Jones
  • October 26, 2021

Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS), a liberal arts and sciences institution in Geneva, N.Y., announced this week that it is continuing its partnership with identity security solutions provider SecureAuth to secure its data regarding students, employees and research.

According to a press release, the HWS IT security and infrastructure team recently began moving college applications from its premises to the cloud. The new solution required increased focus on user identities. Expanding user access also required enabling different authentication methods to increase the security of users’ identities. The team turned to multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a flexible, federated solution, and it turned to the SecureAuth Identity Platform to streamline the authentication process.

“What we liked about SecureAuth is that we could get federation, self-service password management and multi-factor authentication in one product—as well as have the ability to go to one source for support,” said Derek Lustig, Director of Infrastructure and Security Services at HWS. “As a matter of fact, we put in place always-on MFA for our systems that house sensitive or restricted data. We are on this journey of migrating and better protecting applications and resources. SecureAuth continues to give us options and the ability to fine-tune our approach to authentication, depending upon the system that it is protecting and the audience that is using it.”

HWS noted that it required a variety of MFA options among the demand for mobile access and the transition to the cloud. Part of the difficulty was finding a solution that would allow legitimate users easy access, while only initiating friction during high-risk login attempts. SecureAuth and HWS also partnered on a custom PeopleSoft Authenticator.

“Their robust rollout and transition to MFA resulted in a successful implementation that led to 100 percent end-user adoption across their more than 2,000 undergraduate, staff, students and faculty,” said Matt Ulery, SecureAuth’s Chief Product Officer. “We are partnering with Hobart and William Smith Colleges as they look toward secure password-less user journeys.”

About the Author

Matt Jones is senior editor of Spaces4Learning and Campus Security and Life Safety. He can be reached at [email protected]

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