The Identity and Access Management (IAM) team at Harvard University Information Technology reached a major milestone over the weekend of Aug. 16 with the foundation release of SailPoint IdentityIQ, a user provisioning and identity management platform that plays a key role in IAM’s efforts to improve user account management across the Harvard Community.

This release represents the first step toward providing common integration across the many identity stores across the University, and specifically manages the migration of provisioning of the University Active Directory (AD) using IdentityIQ. With the foundation release, the project’s core provisioning infrastructure is now live — the initial provisioning run completed with a success rate of more than 99.9%, and has successfully performed more than 7000 updates during release validation. Next steps include provisioning all existing Harvard Office 365 customers and supporting production go-live for Harvard’s next-generation Student Information System (SIS) as it prepares for launch in Academic Year 2015-16.

Although no change is visible to end users in this phase, the foundation release represents significant progress in IAM’s provisioning project – this back-end platform change migrates provisioning of the University AD from Harvard’s aging Oracle Waveset instance to IdentityIQ, offering administrative user access to the IdentityIQ console for IAM and Support Services staff and forming a foundation for expanded provisioning in the coming year.

“This SailPoint release represents the first step in a new way of thinking about provisioning,” says Jason Snyder, managing director of HUIT architecture and engineering. “Not only are we no longer beholden to outdated, error-prone methodologies and technology, we are able to offer a new toolset that will help our provisioning efforts as a whole.”