Item: Fischer Identity as a Service
Rating: 8
Author: Michael Quiner

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Fischer Identity as a Service is being used across the complete campus by every constituent--faculty, staff, and students--as an identity management and single sign-on tool. It is used to offer self-serve management to manage account settings and passwords, set up SMS communication, and allow access to web resources.

It is able to automatically provision users and assign roles, provide initial instructions for new account holders, and allow a single username and password to be used across many diverse campus applications.

Pros and Cons

Fischer's support team is always very responsive to our needs and understands the vital role they play in our operation; even though we are in different time zones, they make themselves available beyond their normal operational hours to match our needs.
The import of new user information and the provisioning of their accounts happens very quickly. We are able to have newly registered students accessing their campus accounts in 15 minutes.
Fischer listens well as we describe our needs and future plans for improvements and possible expansion of identity management on our campus.

Reducing the frequency (twice a month) of scheduled outages. But I believe they are making progress toward developing a more robust cloud infrastructure that will eliminate the need for such frequent downtimes.
There are some less than intuitive administration tools, which could be improved. Fisher is always willing to help us when we don't understand the proper way to configure using the tools.
I would like a streamlined way to move changes from our test environment into our production (live) environment instead of having to duplicate the effort.

Return on Investment

Fischer has had a positive impact by providing self-serve identity and password management tools that our constituents can use at their convience, not tied to our operational hours.
Fisher Identity as a Service has been a significant cost, but it is anticipated that it saves our students significant time and effort that they can better dedicate to their academic pursuits.
Negative initial reaction--as this was a new way of doing things, there was a period of confusion among our college constituent that required additional communication and instruction

Alternatives Considered

The Okta Identity Cloud, Microsoft Identity Manager and Ellucian Ethos

Microsoft and Ellucian required too many in-house skills and resources. Fischer seemed to have more of a higher-ed focus and experience; the real difference was the ability for Fischer as a Service to supplement our staff efforts.

Key Insights

Do you think Fischer Identity as a Service delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Fischer Identity as a Service's feature set?

Yes

Did Fischer Identity as a Service live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Fischer Identity as a Service go as expected?

Would you buy Fischer Identity as a Service again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Ellucian Banner, Laserfiche, Moodle

Likelihood to Recommend

Fischer is well suited for the use case scenarios where an institution has not previously used any identity management and needs to quickly provide services to meet regulatory or other deadlines. It also works well when you can implement in smaller batches of user accounts and grow over time. We have found it less appropriate for cases where we have needed to set up on-off temporary or special access. Fischer has worked with us on out-of-band provisioning but we had to pay for extra Fischer professional services to make that work.

Fischer Identity--a speedy way to single sign-on

Overall Satisfaction with Fischer Identity as a Service