Ferrum College Selects QuickLaunch as its Identity Partner

Chicago, IL – July 23, 2020: Ferrum College, a private college in Ferrum, Virginia selected QuickLaunch as its identity partner. As part of this collaboration, QuickLaunch will be offering its proprietary Single Sign-On, Password Manager with MFA, Adaptive Authentication and User Self-Registration.

Why Ferrum College selected QuickLaunch?

The IT Department of Ferrum College is small (consisting of a systems specialist, staff training and technology support specialist, a Help Desk manager, a Director of Network Services and Security, a Director of Information Technology, and a Senior Administrative Computing Specialist), and is typically maxed out in terms of its ability to provide support for the college's technology infrastructure as well as assist faculty, staff, and students with technology issues.

Simplifying even one area that regularly results in Help Desk requests will improve IT response times, thereby improving student experience. Multiple passwords have been an ongoing thorn in the side of the IT Department, because in order to maintain assignments, keep track of their progress on their degree path and other tasks, the students currently must log onto several software platforms separately. This in itself can become onerous and stressful for students as keeping up with several individual passwords (some of which must be updated on a quarterly basis), makes calls to IT to reset forgotten passwords an inevitability. 11% of all Help Desk requests are password reset requests.

QuickLaunch will empower College's IT Department to provide faster resolutions to technical problems reported by students, faculty, and staff without password reset requests consuming valuable work time. Similarly, the students would be empowered by the ability to manage their own passwords through a Single Sign-On solution, eliminating frustration and anxiety that can occur when a reset is needed in the evening, on weekends, or on breaks when the Help Desk is unavailable.

Single Sign-On (SSO) will benefit the college by improving user experience for faculty, students, and staff by increasing ease of accessibility and removing the need to manage multiple passwords for the many platforms they use daily for classwork, task management, and other essential functions. For the IT department, SSO will make their work more efficient by allowing passwords to be managed through a single platform, saving time, and more importantly, improve security for proprietary or confidential information that may be compromised due to weak passwords.

Password Manager with MFA will allow users to reset their passwords without the intervention of IT help desk. This will free IT help desk for other productive tasks and save password reset costs incurred for every password reset request going through IT help desk. Adaptive Authentication will help in detecting and responding to suspicious login while User Self-Registration will bring an end to practice of sending default passwords to new users joining the institution.

Solutions Offered Single Sign-On, Password Manager with MFA, Adaptive Authentication, User Self-Registration
Apps to be Integrated Ellucian Colleague 5.6, Brightspace, Gmail, Office 365, School Dude, EZ Proxy

About Ferrum College

Founded in 1913, Ferrum is a liberal arts institution related to the United Methodist Church. The mission of the institution is to educate students in the disciplines of higher learning and to help them be thoughtful and perceptive, to be articulate and professionally capable, and to be caring and concerned citizens of their community, nation, and world.

About QuickLaunch

QuickLaunch is the only AI-first identity and integration platform-as-a-service (IDaaS and iPaaS) that transforms how cloud-savvy institutions and companies manage human and device authentication, authorization, access control and integration. QuickLaunch leverages AI to autodetect threats and step up authentication. More than 500 institutions such as New Mexico State University and Colorado Community College System along with companies such as Jenzabar, Unifyed, OculusIT, and BlackBeltHelp trust QuickLaunch to protect and manage over 2,000,000 identities and integration to over 3,000 applications such as Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Box, Canvas, Blackboard, G Suite and Office 365.