Account Management

1
Account Management

• ITEC Advisory Committee
• June, 2006
• James Lyall Mark Ritschard

2
Goal

• Create the perception of a single account name
  and password for faculty and students
• Not Identity Management (IdM) as it is popularly
  defined.

3
Concerns

• Proliferation of accounts
• Security eID information being passed to and/or
  duplicated in many areas
• Duplication of resources
• jlyall_at_lamar eID
• jlyall_at_CAHS College labs
• James.Lyall_at_colostate.edu Exchange account
• jlyall_at_Engr disk space

4
How?

• Local Management of Central Accounts
• (analogous to current network management)
• Accounts centrally maintained by ACNS
• Accounts locally managed by organizational units
  
• Services provided by the corresponding unit
• Organize all Active Directory accounts in a fixed
  set of Organizational Units (OUs)
• Must be a partnership between ACNS and Campus

5
Why?

• Services are more and more integrated and access
  to services is complicated from a user
  perspective
• This is not an ideal, but could make a
  significant improvement for the faculty, staff,
  and students
• Good deal of work to switch services to centrally
  managed accounts must re-create some services
• In some cases, OUs lose total autonomy over
  accounts
• OUs manage the exceptions

6
Implementation

• eID accounts in Active Directory
• - OU 1
• - OU 2
• .
• .
• .
• - OU n 1
• Box of those who didnt fit one of the above
• Individuals will self-discover that they
  landed here
• Not ACNSs responsibility to address exceptions,
  but that of the service provider
• People changes are not that dynamic
• ACNS need not provide all of the effort for
  this change
• Much of the responsibility for discovery,
  implementation, and maintenance falls to the
  individual units

7
Possible Modified Process
Colorado State University
eID
Windows Forest
Encrypted
CS Unix Account
ENGR Unix Account
8
Benefits

• Allows USE of eID
• Consistent for Faculty, Staff, Students
• Accounts reside where support is provided
• Fewer accounts less duplication of resources

9
Imperatives

• Maintain a high level of security
• Provide for redundancy
• Avoid getting derailed by exceptions and work
  to improve the services we all offer to our
  constituents