University of Notre Dame

The Cirrus Bridge quickly connected Okta to InCommon services and provided Notre Dame users a consistent and intuitive login experience.

The University of Notre Dame had hundreds of applications using CAS for Web Single Sign-On and SAML (via Shibboleth) for InCommon federated applications.  

To support a cloud first strategy, Notre Dame chose Okta as their primary Identity Management solution.  

The Okta Identity solution had 2 gaps:  

• Didn’t integrate with the InCommon trust federation 
• Didn’t support applications using CAS 

The conversion of the Notre Dame CAS applications to use SAML and the newly purchased Okta Identity Solution was anticipated to take over 2 years. 

Notre Dame needed a solution to speed up the migration.

The University of Notre Dame utilized the Cirrus Identity Bridge solution to fill the gaps with Okta.  This allowed them to quickly implement and begin yielding legacy infrastructure and support savings.  

The Cirrus Federation Bridge supports multi-lateral federations required by InCommon and eduGAIN, allowing Notre Dame to migrate to Okta and still maintain access to InCommon services.

The Cirrus CAS Bridge enabled SSO via Okta to over 100 CAS-enabled applications so that Notre Dame could expedite their implementation to make Okta for their Identity Provider.

The Bridge service maps attributes (first name, last name and eduPersonPrincipalName) from Notre Dame’s Okta instance into the format expected by InCommon and CAS applications.  

From a technical perspective, the Bridge acts as an Identity Provider to Service Providers in InCommon and as a Service Provider to Okta at Notre Dame. 

Cirrus provided expert guidance and over 150 Service Provider integrations were configured and tested over a few months.  The actual migration was handled via a simple DNS change on the cutover weekend.