The future of education is digital. Programming is quickly overtaking traditional languages like French and German as a preferred foreign language elective and parents in the United States are aggressively pushing STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). At the University level, even liberal arts majors are stressing the importance of technology within their own practices.
This trend is only going to deepen as millennial people who reached young adulthood around the year 2000 represent a massive population that has been indoctrinated from birth into the digital age. The technological trends in education and academic organizations designed to serve these millennials are starting to use multiple applications that require many user logons, as well as applications that are more web-based. That in turn is triggering the need for a password manager for those environments.
The question of need has transcended the discussion of cost and benefit. The cost of a password manager implementation is increasingly more affordable, and the available solutions are much less complex. This leaves potential password manager customers free to evaluate benefits without excessive concern for cost. With so many benefits to the education sector, the best way to better understand the value of password manager within this field is to look at it from both the student and university IT support perspectives.
From a student perspective
Since password manager provides users the ability to logon to multiple applications by providing a single user name and password, the immediate benefit to the student is from a user-experience perspective. As opposed to having to remember multiple passwords and usernames, now the student just has to remember one.
At face-value, this simplified user-experience improvement saves time, however it also adds the ability for the student to take advantage of mobile computing. This allows them to work and learn where, when and how they want to work while taking advantage of an interface that is now easier to use. It perfectly dovetails with their experience growing up and using technology.
From the university IT perspective
From a university standpoint, the operational benefits of password manager are also profound. Funding is always a challenge in the education sector. By using password manager, IT help desks benefit from reduced password reset calls, saving them money and time. Additionally, password manager solutions are automated, affordable, scalable and easy to setup and use within an enterprise.
Another added benefit of an password manager is that simplifies the back-end of a university password management system, allowing them to expand their footprint with other institutions while expanding the level and amount of online services they can provide to their constituents and students.
This includes the ability to expand their online presence, which circles back to the value-added activities for the student of being able to provide the choice of when and how and where they want to learn.
This Blog was brought to you by Hypersocket and its CEO, Lee David Painter. With over 20 years of industry experience as a pioneer in IT Security, Lee developed the world’s first OpenSource browser-based SSL VPN (SSL-Explorer). Today Lee runs Hypersocket, a leader in virtual private network technology.
