[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Stanley Hammer. And I'm from Western Carolina University. I'm the chief technologist and director of the Chief Technologist and Security Office.
Western Carolina University is located in the Western part North Carolina. We're noted for our small student-to-teacher faculty ratio, a nationally recognized and rated the number one outdoor school. We have about 2,500 full-time and part-time faculty and staff. And then the number of students is 10,000 plus.
Some of the challenges that the university faces are the normal challenges of getting people the right access at the right time, where you have a large number of people, students, adults, living on campus. You've got a EMS crew. You have a police force, health clinics, things like that that you have to support. We also on campus have a charter school, a middle school, the kinds of populations that make it very interesting to understand and provide services for.
Identity management is important for a university because electronic identity and access go hand-in-hand. Door access, registering for classes, checking your financial aid status, emailing your professor, those are all things that you've got to give timely and effectively without any issues.
When we chose Identity Manager from One Identity several years ago, we looked across the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We talked to several folks. And we evaluated the products. And so at the end of the day, we felt that One Identity was a really good fit for us, not only in the capabilities, but with the alignment with our infrastructure in our growing capacity.
When we finally acquired One Identity, it was very critical for us to learn how to use Identity Manager and grow identity management capabilities. So we partner with Immersion.
And it's been invaluable. There is staff augmentation. They provide architectural oversight to help us with upgrades if we need it, all kinds of stuff because we are small, three-person office, so we need the help. And we need the expertise.
So it's invaluable to find a partnership with somebody we knew, we could talk to, we could trust, that would help us move forward with our goals and division of labor. We're able to do a lot of stuff that we wouldn't bring them in to do. But they can fill in gaps that we can't do and are continually growing. And they continue to share knowledge with us. So we're expanding our capability. And it's probably more valuable than going to training classes.
The business values and benefits that we've seen by adopting One Identity and implementing it has been, gosh, tremendous. Knowledge is acquired over time and in layers. And we need the knowledge from the beginning. We needed somebody to help us, guide us, architect with us, do all kinds of stuff.
We're now about 100% automating all our accounts and timely termination of those accounts based on data from coming from our ERP system, from hiring, as well as registration, and applications, and admissions, and everything. So, it's all data-driven, request-driven, with automated fulfillment. That means now when an employee starts, their account is created that morning out of their first day of work automatically. They're emailed to the personal email to, you know, how to get in, the instructions. And they get in, and boom, they hit the ground running.
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