Case Study: Northern Arizona University achieves 10x faster identity management with Ping Identity

Northern Arizona University Brings High Performance to Higher Education

Northern Arizona University (NAU), a public university with more than 25,000 students at its Flagstaff campus and 30+ locations, faced an aging Oracle DSEE directory that struggled with scale, speed and stability while managing up to 180,000 identities. The IT team needed better visibility, easier administration and reliable multi‑master replication; after evaluating vendors, they chose the Ping Identity Platform for its 10x performance improvement and strong support.

Ping now serves as NAU’s central directory for both internal and external users, with advanced dashboards, scripting for self‑tuning and auditing, and support for large bios/demos and a highly customized schema. The deployment delivered measurable gains: 10x faster identity processing, support for as many as 7 million searches daily, 50% fewer replication instances and 50% lower memory usage, plus faster plug‑in creation and deployment (one day) and cleaner, more auditable identity data.

Northern Arizona University

Summer Steddom

Middleware and IAM Technical Lead