Union College

The Cirrus Bridge allowed Union College to quickly connect  Okta to InCommon services and provided campus users a consistent login experience for all applications.

Union was moving from Fisher Identity to Okta and needed the Cirrus Bridge to continue to provide access to many of the services offered through the InCommon federation.  Some of the most used at Union are as follows:   ProQuest databases, eBooks and technology for research,  JSTOR and digital library of academic journals and books, Kanopy is an on-demand streaming video platform for universities, EBSCO tools for academic libraries, ScienceDirect a source for scientific, technical, and medical research, Gale  digital archive of research databases, reference books, HathiTrust digital library, Atypon an ecommerce service for many scholarly and academic publishers, Symplicity to support the student experience, Springer publishing of online journals and books.

Union College implemented Cirrus InCommon / EduGAIN solutions with Okta for researchers, faculty, staff and students to quickly access critical services provided through the InCommon federation using their Union login/password.  Okta requires the Cirrus Bridge solutions to support the mesh style Federation required by InCommon.

We guided Union College through the configuration of the Cirrus Bridge to enable Okta/InCommon connectivity.  

Then, after inventorying the existing applications used by Union, we helped guide the configuration of the service providers in the Cirrus Bridge primarily focused on the service provider attribute release and accurately matching attributes in Okta.  Attribute setup for REFEDS (the Research and Education FEDerations group) R&S categories is included out-of-the-box with the Bridge, so those integrations are quick. 

Union utilized the Cirrus DNS add-on to the Bridge and was able to add a new CNAME for a quick production cutover.

The Cirrus Bridge allows the researchers to use their Union account/password with their existing login screen to access the new applications/service providers offered through InCommon.  

The project with Union and Cirrus kicked off in September with configuration and testing in October and November. By December everything was setup in production.