Western Governors University Takes Higher Education Higher

Lamont Peterson, I'm the Access and Security Operations Lead at Western Governors University.
WGU's existing Open SSO solution has supported authentication for students and for staff, Employees, for our contractors, anybody who needed to access our systems, Whether it's me accessing my own email, a student logging in in order to take their Classes, or what have you.
OpenSSO was also used.
With some SAML 2.0 authentications to work with some of our external providers.
Now, being in education, we also have a lot of protocol called LTI and with over 100 different Content providers, they still have LTI going on.
And this is not a protocol that's really Supported and all that great anymore, but more And more of them are beginning to pick up with Standard technologies.
And we wanted to be able to replace OpenSSO.
We're changing over to PingFederate.
And in doing so, we wanted to make sure that we had a few things covered.
We want to support modern protocols.
We wanted to make sure, Of course, that we had SAML and that we could do OOF.
But adding in OpenID Connect.
And the other kicker was development really wanted to see an Application Gateway Architecture.
And so bringing PingAxis in with PingFederate Was a real kicker that helped us sell that product as the choice that we wanted to make.
When it came down to two products, PingFederate was one of them, And we said, yeah, well, we kind of think the competitor is the one because that’s going to Be an easy transition from the existing system.
Ping is kind of a different thing as we actually did a proof of concept and had both Companies come in and we installed product, and actually tried things out.
We found Ping was superior in performance of the product.
The ease of administration, even me in a day to day use of it.
The product is much more responsive using Ping Federate and Ping Access.
And we also saw that it had all of the capability to deal with the transitions, Whereas the competition.
Well, they just didn't stack up.
One of the challenges that we faced shortly after I had joined the company was that WGU's Main page for the Student Portal would take a good, you know, 20 or 30 seconds for students to log in and get the thing displayed.
And this was something that evolved over time.
Uh, very organic page, lots of little components that, Uh, compiling together.
One of the problems was OpenSSO.
Uh, performance was not consistent.
We did a lot of work to do some performance tuning there and got it to be leveled and Consistent, and that was great.
And in selecting a new product, We didn't want to take a step backwards.
We wanted to take a step forwards.
We needed to see better performance, and Ping Confederate gave us that performance in spades.