Case Study: University of California San Diego achieves centralized multi-platform researcher authentication and streamlined user management with BeyondTrust PowerBroker Identity Services

University of California San Diego Keeps Focus on Collaboration with PowerBroker

The University of California San Diego Physics Department, a high‑profile research unit, faced an increasingly complex authentication problem: researchers were authenticating to individual Windows, Unix and Linux workstations with separate usernames and passwords, creating a poor user experience and an administrative nightmare. IT needed a reliable way to leverage the university’s Active Directory, enforce group policies across heterogeneous systems, and map legacy Unix/Linux user IDs to avoid changing ownership of millions of files.

UCSD deployed BeyondTrust PowerBroker Identity Services—starting with a 12‑month pilot and expanding to full production across eight research groups—to centralize authentication and group management without modifying AD schema. The solution unified account maintenance, preserved previous UIDs, streamlined one‑to‑many configuration management, and yielded significant time savings and reduced administrative overhead, becoming the department’s de facto standard for centralized authentication.

University of California San Diego

Bryan Hill

Lead System Administrator