Case Study: Academy of Art University achieves unified identity management and seamless, secure campus-wide SSO with Ping Identity

Academy of Art University Paints A New Vision for Student-Centric IT

Academy of Art University, the largest accredited private art and design school in the U.S., serves a complex community of more than 18,000 students across 21 colleges and 45 buildings. The university needed a student‑centric identity and access solution to manage rapidly changing identities, automate provisioning, and deliver seamless, secure access to both on‑premises and cloud applications — including mobile access across campus.

After evaluating several vendors, the university implemented PingFederate for on‑premises SSO, federated identity management, mobile identity security and automated provisioning, using prebuilt connectors plus a custom LMS integration. The result: 27,000 student records consolidated in Salesforce, roughly 25,000 users on secure SSO, about 9,000 students and graduates provisioned/de‑provisioned annually, and uninterrupted secure access across the distributed campus and cloud services.

Academy of Art University

Erik Viens

Executive VP of Technology and CIO