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Knight Vision

ABOUT ENTERPRISE STANDARD TOOLS

Enterprise Standard Tools have implemented modern platforms for identity and access management, integration and low code development.

Low-Code Platforms

A low-code platform provides a development environment used to create application software through a graphical user interface. Low-code platforms can reduce the amount of traditional time spent, enabling accelerated delivery of business applications. A common benefit is that a wider range of people can contribute to the application’s development—not only those with coding skills but require good governance to be able to adhere to common rules and regulations. They can also lower the initial cost of setup, training, deployment and maintenance.

Why Does UCF Need a Low-Code Platform?

As we migrate away from our highly customized PeopleSoft environment to the new, cloud-based Workday platform, we have to account for many of those legacy customizations that colleges and departments depend on today. Some will be replaced by out-of-the-box capabilities of Workday. Some will be replaced by commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) applications. Others may need to be rebuilt altogether. UCF IT plans to rebuild these custom applications using our low code platforms. These platforms will also be made available to the campus community to help citizen developers solve their department’s or college’s individual custom business application needs going forward.

Enterprise Identity and Access Management

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an integrated system of policies, business processes and technologies that manage the lifecycle of a digital identity.  An identity management system provisions, authorizes, and de-provisions account access for users in a multitude of enterprise and downstream systems and applications. The IAM system creates one digital identity per user and once that identity is established, it must be maintained, modified and monitored throughout the account’s lifecycle.

Why Does UCF Need a New Identity Platform?

Workday ERP is not a solution for identity management processes. The current identity processes that are custom built within PeopleSoft ERP will need a new home since they are not being incorporated into Workday ERP.  A dedicated identity and access management solution that can provision new NID accounts and manage the 1.5 million current accounts is an essential component of the overall Knight Vision project and strategy.   It is essential that UCF find a solution to handle these identity processes that are relied upon heavily across the university.

Knight Vision Enterprise Technology Tools

The Identity and Access Management (IAM) team assessed the market and selected SailPoint IdentityNow to serve as the new identity management tool responsible for integrating Workday, PeopleSoft , and other downstream applications.  The Workday Integration, PeopleSoft Retrofits, Informatica Implementation, ServiceNow, and other supporting teams are currently working on the implementation.  IAM, with the help of professional implementation services from SailPoint, will program IdentityNow to integrate with Workday and manage the account life cycle of provisioning, authorizing, and de-provisioning user account access. 

SailPoint is a Software as a Service (SaaS) application that resides in the cloud.  Because of this, maintenance and patching are expected to have a minimal effect on the user experience and will deliver higher availability. This SaaS-based approach will enable rapid deployment of new updates and new functionality will be delivered automatically.

Tangible & intangible benefits of SailPoint IdentityNow are as follows: 

  • Align with UCF’s “cloud-first” strategy. 
  • Minimal development or customizations. 
  • Improvements to IAM innovation and security.  
  • Role-based and event-driven access. 
  • Single Identity toolset. 

Integrations and API Management

Integration platforms significantly improve speed to deliver, increase consistency, and security. Application Program Interface (API) Management helps organize, secure, and make re-usable interfaces to specific systems improving standardization and speed to delivery.  These tools are typically included in all modern information technology ecosystems.

Knight Vision Enterprise Technology Tools Working Group Recommendations

UCF applications impacted by the Knight Vision Project have many integrations that need to be re-developed as we migrate to the ERP new system.

UCF IT has managed the SnapLogic platform for more than three years and successfully implemented several integration solutions.  While we are familiar with this software, there have been limitations and support issues leading us toward a more comprehensive integration solution.

After reviewing multiple Integration Tool vendors, Informatica (SaaS) has come out on top as the product best suited to help develop integrations as part of the Knight Vision project.  Hundreds of integrations will need to be developed with both on-campus and off-campus systems, and integration tools like Informatica will be required if these integrations are to be re-developed in any reasonable amount of time.

At present, UCF does not leverage an enterprise-standard API Management tool.  It is a certainty that APIs will play a central role in the ERP implementation, not only due to the API’s exposed by Workday, but also because interactions between Workday and the legacy Campus Solutions will need to traverse cloud and on-premises boundaries.  Attempting to manage this set of API-based, hybrid cloud integrations will be very difficult without the API gateway capabilities provided by a leading API management solution.  It is for these reasons that we will implement an API management solution to support the Workday implementation effort.