Cabarrus County Boosts AD Efficiency and Security with Active Roles

Benefits

• Boosted automated identity security through group management permissions and policies
• Secured provisioning and deprovisioning accounts for maximum efficiency
• Experienced reliable policy configurations with a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ functionality
• Enjoyed guided and fast support

The Story

With the field of education continuing to be a hotbed for scrutiny, counties can’t afford cybersecurity breaches in their schools. But with the constant revolving of accounts and identities, due to teacher onboarding and offboarding, graduations or student transfers from county to county, AD account provisioning and day to day management of Active Directory (AD) can easily morph into a nightmare.

In the North Carolina county of Cabarrus, the school system looked for ways to boost both security and efficiency. The IT department had their hands full provisioning and deprovisioning an ever-changing set of 41,000 user accounts, including 5,000 staff and 36,000 student users.

The previous solution for the constant flux of users didn’t provide all the desired automations or security for Cabarrus County Schools. They found a fix for this issue in One Identity Active Roles.

Efficiency is one of the main issues for the IT department, which covers the gamut of all aspects of technology.

Active Roles’ ability to automatically create new accounts gives the county schools a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ functionality within their networks, saving the county countless hours and money in password reset and AD management and allowing easy group policy management, privilege checks and even audits.

“Simply transferring between schools within the district is an Active Directory nightmare unless it's a little bit automated,” says Mickey Farmer, Director of Systems Technology and Innovation. “The automation provided by Active Roles, One Identity and your other products just takes away the need for the constant edits and the constant manual adds and removals, freeing your staff up for everything else that they need to be doing.”

But identity security also remains a concern in Cabarrus County Schools, especially since most users are young and have yet to build their technological literacy. This makes them one of the highest targets in the world of cyber threats, according to Farmer. “If you take a five-year-old, a kindergartner, and somebody gets a hold of their social security number, they've got about 13 years of just stealing that identity before anybody even notices it.”

This made Active Roles and other One Identity products even more important to Cabarrus County’s Technology Department, as they put them in a proactive instead of reactive situation and gave them the security, efficiency and management boost that every set of schools desires and deserves.