Case Study: Southwestern College achieves dramatic help-desk call reductions and campus-wide SSO with PortalGuard

Southwestern College - Customer Case Study

Southwestern Community College District in Chula Vista, California, serves roughly 30,000 students, faculty and staff and relied on more than a dozen web apps (Canvas, Blackboard, G Suite, OpenCCCApply, SharePoint, etc.). The IT help desk was overwhelmed with password-reset calls—especially at the start and end of semesters—while an existing, hard-to-maintain IdP and lack of reliable disaster recovery left users locked out of critical hosted services during on‑premises outages.

SWC selected PortalGuard (PistolStar) to provide centralized self-service password reset and a flexible IdP supporting SAML and CAS, enabling single sign-on to 12+ applications. PortalGuard’s forced-enrollment password management and simple configuration dramatically reduced help-desk calls, and an Azure-based disaster-recovery instance ensured continued access to Canvas, Blackboard, G Suite and other apps during outages, improving reliability and the overall user and admin experience.

Southwestern College

Clifford Sharp

Network Security Systems Analyst