Case Study: Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts achieves hardware consolidation, SSO access, and enhanced security with F5 Networks BIG‑IP solutions

DWCLA Deploys BIG-IP Solutions to Consolidate Network Equipment, Build Basic SSO Framework

Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts faced limited rack space while moving core IT systems to a private cloud and deploying Office 365, and needed to replace aging authentication and SSL‑VPN systems while enabling single sign‑on (SSO) across diverse campus applications. To address these challenges the college selected F5 Networks and its BIG‑IP portfolio (BIG‑IP APM, BIG‑IP LTM and BIG‑IP AFM) to consolidate networking equipment and build an SSO framework.

Using F5 Networks’ BIG‑IP solutions (deployment began July 2016 and went live September 2016), the college migrated firewalls and load balancing to BIG‑IP LTM, consolidated SSL‑VPN and implemented a portal with BIG‑IP APM that forwards authentication data to campus systems (linking Office 365 via AD/ADFS and enabling 802.1X Wi‑Fi authentication). The implementation saved rack space, reduced administrative logins and operational tasks, delivered SSO for administrative, library, WebDAV and webmail systems, and added DoS/DDoS protection with BIG‑IP AFM — all achieved in about two months with further BIG‑IP feature rollouts planned.

Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts

Kenji Akashi

Team Leader, Network Infrastructure, Accounting