University of Colorado centralizes identities using Oracle

The Office of Information Technology oversees technology decisions for both CU Denver and Anschutz Medical Campus, while also influencing and managing identities for the entire University of Colorado system. The campuses did not have a centralized system for identity functions such as provisioning, authentication, and single sign-on. Each of these services was a disparate application across the university, leading to additional work and no centralized identity process. Each person had several login credentials and no centralized thread to connect the users with the identity.

Compliance was also a big challenge for the Office of Information Technology. The Anschutz Medical Campus must adhere to strict federal requirements, such as HIPAA. HIPAA has many requirements for identity, including being able to verify a user and provide documentation on established procedures for authorizing access to that user. With more than 18 individual processes running at every college, simply meeting the compliance standards became nearly impossible.

CU Denver selected Oracle Identity and Access Management because it is the most mature product in the market. Now, the university continues to innovate, bringing in Oracle Identity Cloud Service to enhance offerings for students, staff, faculty, and alumni. Oracle Identity enables CU Denver to excel with more than 100 federation partners and integrations.

"From our perspective, Oracle had the most mature product in the market. It has continued to mature over time as technology needs have evolved. Arisant and Oracle were able to come in and help teach us. When you implement a new technology that opens up a whole frontier of capabilities, you realize that was really worth it."
-Russell Poole, Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Technology Officer, University of Colorado

The University of Colorado Denver selected Oracle Identity and Access Management initially and has subsequently launched Oracle Cloud Identity to support all campuses in the University of Colorado system. With the help of the Arisant team, CU Denver was able to build a standardized process for identity that significantly reduced redundant work, lowered risk, and helped the university meet its HIPAA compliance requirements. With Oracle Identity, CU Denver was able to reduce help desk calls by 90% and achieve near real-time provisioning for more than 300,000 centralized identities.

This implementation has directly impacted the Anschutz Medical Campus by enabling it to meet both compliance requirements and improve its ability to provide partner access to its clinical information data warehouse. This access significantly improves collaboration among students, faculty, and partnering hospitals. With Oracle Identity and Access Management, the Office of Information Technology was able to work with all four campuses to leverage a common identity platform, creating a great partnership among campuses and a consistent user experience for students and faculty.

Arisant has worked closely with the university for more than 10 years and was key to the success of Oracle Identity at the University of Colorado. Arisant was founded in 2006 by Oracle professionals who shared a passion for designing, building and supporting scalable, cost effective Oracle Infrastructure environments, and wanted to provide intelligent solutions for complex business problems and challenges faced by business and IT departments.

"It was really about building a relationship and not just buying a piece of technology. Arisant really helped us leverage the Oracle technology and built a relationship to be successful," Poole says.