The University of Western Australia Finds Power and Simplicity in the Cloud

The Opportunity

Established in 1911 with a mission to advance its communities’ prosperity and welfare, The University of Western Australia has a long and rich history as a centre for teaching and cross-disciplinary research. Among the oldest universities in Australia and a member of the Group of Eight (the country’s leading research intensive universities), UWA serves more than 28,000 students from 115 countries. These students come for its top-ranked programs in engineering, science, and the arts, its innovative partnerships with government and industry, and its commitment to cross-disciplinary education. Located in Perth, one of Australia’s largest and fastest-growing cities, UWA also maintains a satellite campus on the rural Australian coast as well as strategic partnerships with research institutions in Singapore and Malaysia.

The diversity of UWA’s international student body reflects its location in the major Australian capital city that’s closest to Asia. It also mirrors the enormous variety of research interests displayed by UWA’s schools, including Indigenous culture, environmental resilience, artificial intelligence, data science, biotechnology and sustainable energy production.

However, the University’s approach to identity management wasn’t always as innovative and future-focused as its globally-oriented research objectives. Individual schools and institutes had built and managed their own technology systems, resulting in a complex and siloed access landscape that made centralised governance and visibility all but impossible. To enhance the student experience and build a robust digital backbone for ongoing excellence, UWA needed a new way to manage access—one that could provide all users, regardless of their role or geographic location, with seamless login experiences, rapid provisioning, and secure, compliant permissions. Saviynt’s converged platform delivered flexible automation, scalability, and control, transforming cybersecurity stakeholders’ vision into reality.

The Solution

The Saviynt Identity Cloud can automatically identify risky combinations of privileges that arise when individual users fill multiple roles within the same organisation, something that’s common in higher education: students also serve as staff members when they have on-campus jobs, and postgraduate researchers might also be alumni, among many other examples. As universities become increasingly reliant on technology and regulatory requirements evolve, preventing such Separation of Duties (SoD) violations by applying automation and intelligent analytics is a must-have.

Decision-makers at UWA selected the Saviynt platform in part because Saviynt made it easier to identify toxic combinations than competing solutions. They also appreciated Saviynt’s ability to identify duplicate accounts across multiple systems, helping them streamline the clean-up phase of the implementation.

After integrating multiple Active Directory (AD) services with Saviynt and bringing the University’s finance, HR, and student information systems into the platform, UWA’s team began to see the value that a comprehensive approach to identity governance enables. Migrating to the cloud allowed for near-infinite scalability, supported much-improved experiences for end users and administrators alike, and created unprecedented efficiencies. At the same time, the Saviynt platform could seamlessly integrate with on-premises systems, providing a single pane-of-glass view across the entire identity ecosystem along with unified reporting.

“Saviynt provided us with enhanced visibility, which has enabled us to become more proactive,” says Patterson. “We can now identify risks and potential issues before they present problems for compliance. Because we’ve eliminated manual processes, we have fewer errors and more consistency, further reducing security risks across the identity lifecycle.”

Adopting Saviynt’s comprehensive platform approach will empower the UWA team to unify provisioning, identity governance, privileged access management, and cloud security—all in one place. Being a premier research university means having increasingly complex identity and security needs, but UWA is ready for the future with Saviynt.

The Results

With the Saviynt Identity Cloud, the UWA team has gained the ability to enforce consistent access policies across all of these applications, reducing identity-related risks and improving user experiences simultaneously. They’ve also reaped the benefits of automated provisioning and deprovisioning: greater operational efficiency, streamlined workflows, and improved joiner mover-leaver (JML) processes. In addition, UWA has been able to implement an access certification program, a key step in achieving ongoing audit-readiness. And they’re well on their way to implementing University-wide role-based access controls (RBAC) and privileged access management (PAM).