Education

Managing thousands of identities that change every semester.

Education institutions have some of the highest identity volumes and turnover rates of any sector. New student cohorts every semester, graduating cohorts every year, casual staff across multiple appointments, and research collaborators from around the world. Manual identity management does not work at this scale.

Talk to our education team Identity Maturity Assessment

100+IAM & PAM Projects

100%Australian-Owned

2BeyondTrust Technical Excellence Awards, 2024-2026

1Microsoft Solutions Partner for Security

Education identity challenges

The identity challenges specific to education.

Education institutions face a combination of scale, workforce complexity, federation requirements, and regulatory obligations that standard enterprise IAM does not address out of the box.

High volume and high turnover: new student cohorts each semester, graduating cohorts each year, requiring automated lifecycle management
Staff identity spanning academic, professional, casual, and adjunct categories with different access requirements
Student-managed devices and BYOD environments with appropriate conditional access controls
Research collaboration identity: access to external HPC facilities, research datasets, and NCI (National Computational Infrastructure)
Library and research resource provisioning and deprovisioning aligned to enrolment and graduation
Australian Privacy Act requirements for student personal information, including sensitive student records
Microsoft 365 Education licensing and identity configuration aligned to academic requirements

Modern 42 engineers collaborating on identity automation

Identity lifecycle

Automation is not optional at education scale.

Students who graduated three years ago should not still have access to university systems. Staff in casual roles accumulate access across multiple appointments. Education institutions consistently appear in data breach reports because of stale account management and inadequate leaver processes.

The scale of education identity environments makes manual management impractical. A university with 40,000 students processes thousands of identity lifecycle events each semester. Without automation, stale accounts and excessive access accumulate faster than any team can remediate.

Seasonal provisioning

Automated provisioning workflows triggered by enrolment events in your student management system, not manual IT requests.

Graduation deprovisioning

Systematic deprovisioning of student access at graduation, with appropriate grace periods for alumni services and transcript access.

Relevant services

What we deliver for education institutions.

Workforce IAM & IGA

Student and staff identity lifecycle automation. Integration with student management systems for automated provisioning and deprovisioning aligned to enrolment and graduation events.

SSO Application Migration

Single sign-on for library systems, learning management platforms, research tools, and third-party academic services. Modern Entra ID SSO replacing legacy ADFS or custom federation.

MIM Replacement

Many universities run legacy Microsoft Identity Manager for identity synchronisation. We replace MIM with modern Entra ID Lifecycle Workflows and cloud-based provisioning.

Privileged Access Management

Credential vaulting, just-in-time access, and session recording for administrative and research infrastructure access. Protecting privileged accounts across university IT environments.

Identity Maturity Assessment

Higher education sector baseline assessment. We assess your current identity controls against sector requirements and produce a prioritised roadmap for improvement.

Modern 42 engineers modernising legacy identity systems for the education sector

Legacy Identity Modernisation

Still running MIM? There is a modern path forward.

Many Australian universities still rely on Microsoft Identity Manager for student and staff provisioning. MIM is approaching end-of-support, and the migration to cloud-native Entra ID lifecycle workflows does not have to be disruptive. We have done it before.

Related industries

Other sectors we work in.

Case Studies

See the work delivered

Comparable engagements we have delivered. Client names are withheld; the work is not.

View all case studies

Higher Education01

Building a Modern IAM Practice for a Leading Australian University

A leading Australian research university partnered with Modern 42 over multiple years to establish its Identity and Access Management capability from the ground up.

AD FS decommissionedMFA across faculty & studentsBlended team model

Higher Education02

PAM Implementation and Essential Eight Uplift for an Australian Research University

A leading Australian research university engaged Modern 42 to expand its Privileged Access Management capability and progress toward ASD Essential Eight Maturity Level 2.5.

Delinea to BeyondTrustEssential Eight upliftChange management

Frequently asked questions

Education IAM questions.

How do you handle the volume of student identity changes at the start of each semester?

Through automation. The only practical way to handle seasonal onboarding and offboarding at education scale is automated identity lifecycle management. We implement provisioning and deprovisioning workflows that process large cohort changes through integration with your student management system, without manual intervention.

We use Microsoft 365 Education licensing. Does that change what you recommend?

Yes. Microsoft 365 Education licensing includes specific identity capabilities and constraints that differ from commercial licensing. We design identity architectures appropriate to your specific licensing tier and the academic requirements of your institution, including student and staff account separation and licensing optimisation.