As education undergoes continuous digital transformation, these creators, collaborators and innovators are excelling as ed tech leaders.

Carlos Soto is an award-winning reviewer and journalist with 20 years of experience covering technology and business within various sectors and industries. 

Carlos Soto is an award-winning reviewer and journalist with 20 years of experience covering technology and business within various sectors and industries. 

There’s a common misconception that increased security must come at the expense of productivity. This can seem especially true in K–12 classrooms, where students can easily forget passwords for multiple applications, bringing learning to a halt and turning teachers into help desk technicians.

While that may have been true in the past, Okta’s single sign-on software solution shatters that notion. It can provide a major boost to security while making things easier for users. And because it’s deployed as a service, administrators have little maintenance after setup.

The Okta Identity Cloud can integrate with nearly every major web-based or mobile education application available. Once deployed, it delivers complete identity and access management (IAM) that can act as the core of even higher-security methods, such as zero trust. By grouping access to all a user’s applications under one security umbrella, only one password or authentication method is needed. Users log in to the Okta Identity Cloud and get access to all they need.

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Most important, this full-featured federation engine and flexible access policy is reliable. With school districts at risk of hacking and social engineering attacks, Okta single sign-on empowers IT teams with the flexibility and scale of an IAM solution and the reliability of a cloud and mobile platform.

This single view of all applications makes Okta a dream for IT security and human resources. It’s easy to add new programs to the list of managed ones without having to add new passwords. For example, when pushing out a new professional development module or presenting new benefit elections, HR can leverage the Okta Identity Cloud to facilitate access to materials for whoever needs it. Those who don’t need access may not even know that the new resources exist, providing yet another layer of security.

RELATED: Learn how to build a culture of cybersecurity awareness in K–12.

One key benefit of the Okta Identity Cloud, front and center in the latest offering, is the ability to switch over to new devices while still retaining access to important applications and files. If an educator is working on a desktop and transferring to a laptop or tablet to head home, the process is seamless — with no worries about file access or additional passwords.

Unlike legacy federation and access management systems, Okta single sign-on is lightweight and easy to deploy. Since there is only one login, IT security has less to keep track of from a password management perspective. Okta also scales to meet the demands of any school, while securely connecting staff, educators and students to all their cloud and on-premises applications across devices.

Software: Multifactor authentication Aggregator: Works with online and appliance-based services Form: Single sign-on authentication tool Installation: Software as a Service Software License: Subscription with discounts for large deployments

Onboarding and offboarding employees can be challenging for school districts, even though both are critical. If new employees are not onboarded in a timely way, they are essentially locked out of doing their jobs.

According to recent research by Brandon Hall Group, organizations with strong onboarding processes can improve new hire retention by more than 80 percent. On the other end, the longer it takes to remove departing employees from the system, the longer major security holes can exist at an organization.

With more teachers leaving the profession, it is essential for schools to engage with employees in a manner that drives retention and lets new employees become productive quickly.

Okta can grant access to new employees as part of the hiring process. By the time new teachers and staff first set foot on campus or log in from their remote locations, all their access rights have already been sorted out.

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