Unicon Navigate Identity - Managed IAM Platform for Education

Navigate Identity by Unicon - Managed IAM Platform for Higher Education

Navigate Identity by Unicon is a fully managed, single-tenant, AWS-hosted identity and access management (IAM) platform purpose-built for educational institutions and EdTech companies. Backed by 30+ years of Unicon IAM and EdTech expertise, Navigate Identity delivers swift, secure, and streamlined access to the digital tools that learners, faculty, and staff require - with a guaranteed 99.9% uptime SLA.

Why Navigate Identity

• Purpose-built for education: Designed specifically for higher education workflows including semester rollovers, cross-campus federation, and integration with SIS and LMS platforms.
• No per-user licensing costs: Fixed-fee pricing eliminates unpredictable costs as your institution scales.
• InCommon Trusted Access Platform (ITAP) compatible: Fully customizable for ITAP software, enabling seamless participation in federated research and collaboration networks.
• Single-tenant AWS environments: Dedicated infrastructure ensures data isolation, security, and performance for your institution.

Application Components

Shibboleth (Identity Provider): Provides federated web single sign-on (SSO) capabilities using SAML and OIDC protocols, enabling privacy-preserving authorization decisions for access to protected online resources across organizational boundaries.

midPoint (Identity Governance and Administration): Automates user provisioning, registry, and password management. Reduces manual account management effort by providing flexible, policy-driven access to internal and external systems.

Grouper (Access Management): Enterprise access management system that simplifies group-based permissions institution-wide - from semester-start access changes at scale to individual-level management.

Integrations Navigate Identity connects with the systems your institution already uses:

• Student Information Systems: Ellucian, PeopleSoft, Colleague, Workday
• Learning Management Systems: Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, D2L
• Identity Providers and MFA: Microsoft Entra, Okta, Duo, Google
• Protocols supported: SAML, OIDC, LDAP, SCIM, REST APIs

Security and Compliance

• ISO 27001 certified hosted environment
• HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit) completed
• TLS 1.2/1.3 encryption in transit, AES-256 encryption at rest via AWS KMS
• AWS GuardDuty, AWS Inspector, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config for continuous monitoring
• Nightly encrypted backups with point-in-time recovery
• Auto-scaling architecture handles tens of thousands of authentication transactions per hour
• Zero-downtime updates under normal operations

Four-Phase Engagement Process

Phase 1 - Discovery: Unicon assesses your current identity infrastructure, application inventory, and federation requirements to define scope and migration strategy.

Phase 2 - Configuration and Migration: Your dedicated single-tenant AWS environment is provisioned. Shibboleth, midPoint, and Grouper are configured to your institution's policies, integrations, and workflows.

Phase 3 - Testing and Go-Live: Comprehensive testing validates SSO flows, provisioning rules, and group policies before cutover. Implementation is included in the engagement.

Phase 4 - Managed Operations: Unicon's Critical Infrastructure practice provides 24x7 monitoring, incident response, patching, and ongoing optimization with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Prerequisites

• Active InCommon membership (recommended but not required)
• Inventory of applications, source systems, target systems and directories to be integrated
• Designated institutional IT contact for coordination during implementation

To begin, contact Unicon for a discovery consultation to scope your environment and define your migration or implementation path.