Florida College Adopts BIO-key’s PortalGuard Solution

Eastern Florida State College (EFSC) has become BIO-key’s newest PortalGuard customer in the education industry. The school will be using the identity and access management solution to secure two Active Directory domains (one for faculty and staff and another for the school’s 30,000 students), as well as an Ellucian Banner resource planning system.

EFSC needed to adopt a new IAM solution because the legacy one that it had been using could no longer meet the necessary security standards. The organization cited PortalGuard’s success in the educational sector as a key factor in its decision. Multiple academic institutions have become PortalGuard customers since BIO-key obtained the portfolio at the end of June.

For its part, EFSC indicated that the decision has already started to pay dividends. The ability to reset passwords on the Active Directory has reduced the burden on the IT Team, while the platform’s Single Sign-On capabilities have made workflows more efficient for those using applications like Office 365, Canvas, and Salesforce.

“Colleges and universities recognize just how costly inefficient access management can be to the institution,” said PortalGuard President Mark Cochran. “Beyond the obvious security vulnerabilities, institutions are witnessing rising support costs as they struggle to manage the onslaught of ongoing password reset requests.”

EFSC has several campuses spread across the state of Florida, with locations in Cocoa, Melbourne, Palm Bay, and Titusville. It also operates an aerospace program at the Kennedy Space Center.

BIO-key, meanwhile, recently appointed Kimberly Johnson as the company’s new VP of Product Marketing, and credited the acquisition of PortalGuard’s developer for its strong performance over the summer. In addition to a number of academic institutions, the company has already secured new customers in the financial industry and in the public sector in the past few months.

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September 3, 2020 – by Eric Weiss