Mendocino College Embraces PortalGuard Security

BIO-key’s PortalGuard Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solution continues to gain traction with academic institutions, and with California Community Colleges in particular this week. In that regard, Mendocino College has become BIO-key’s latest PortalGuard customer, and is now one of more than 55 schools that have adopted the solution within the California Community College System. BIO-key partnered with North Orange County Community College District back in July of 2020.

Like the other schools, Mendocino College will be using PortalGuard to simplify its access control procedures. The system will provide students, faculty, and staff with single sign-on capabilities, which means that those people will only need to log in once in order to gain access to a number of different applications, including G-Suite, Ellucian, Canvas, and Office 365.

PortalGuard will replace Mendocino’s former Shibboleth IdP access management setup. The school believes that the new system will lower its IT costs by as much as 95 percent, since PortalGuard’s self-service password reset feature will eliminate the password reset calls that used to go to the help desk.

“Higher Education institutions are seeking a partner to assist them with their strategic cloud initiatives and meet the demands for a highly scalable and redundant IAM solution,” said BIO-key PortalGuard President Mark Cochran. “PortalGuard provides powerful features that strengthen the institution’s security posture while also improving the user experience for students, educators, and the IT organization.”

BIO-key introduced a new passwordless authentication feature to PortalGuard in February. Southeastern Illinois College, Eastern Florida State College, and East Georgia State College are some of the schools that have deployed PortalGuard outside of California.

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April 15, 2021 – by Eric Weiss