Public School District

Improving Public School System's Workflows

A public school district's system served 80,000-100,000 users facing unreliable login access, particularly when students changed schools or left the district. Ollon stabilized their identity management system, eliminating service disruptions. Students and teachers now log in reliably without interruption, and IT staff no longer spend time troubleshooting access issues or running manual recovery processes.

Situation

A public school district was facing issues with their identity management workflow, where students and teachers had trouble logging into devices and applications using assigned credentials. The system, already implemented, was not functioning reliably, particularly when handling user transitions like students changing schools or leaving the district.

Solution

Ollon investigated and rearchitected critical components of the existing Okta SSO integration, implementing stronger error handling and targeted data fixes. The team also addressed scaling concerns, deploying additional agents to support 80,000–100,000 users. By improving how the system handled failures, Ollon helped ensure that small issues didn't escalate into larger, system wide disruptions.

Results

The school system experienced significantly fewer service disruptions, with internal staff no longer needing to manually run recovery scripts or troubleshoot frequent errors. After validating all workflows, Ollon delivered a comprehensive report of test cases and outcomes. The system was stabilized, operating efficiently, and did not require further support.

Technologies

Okta

Our Expertise in Action

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

A public school district's identity system had to track tens of thousands of student accounts through school changes, transfers, and departures, but the existing setup wasn't keeping pace with those events. Ollon finalized the lifecycle management workflows so accounts were created, updated, and deactivated as students moved through the district, migrated user groups into the corrected structure, and cleaned up authentication policies that had accumulated without oversight. That cleanup meant access decisions were based on a student's current status, not stale group membership left over from a previous school. The result was an identity system that reflected reality instead of falling further out of sync with every change.

Application triage and rescue

A public school district already had an Okta based single sign on system in place, but it broke down in exactly the moments that mattered most, like when a student changed schools or left the district, leaving both students and IT staff stuck. Ollon investigated the existing integration to find where it was actually failing, then rearchitected the affected components and applied targeted fixes to the underlying data causing the errors. Stronger error handling meant a single failed record no longer cascaded into a wider outage across the login system. What had been an unreliable system inherited from a previous build became one the district's own IT staff no longer had to babysit with manual recovery scripts.

Scalability planning

A public school district's identity system had to support between 80,000 and 100,000 students and staff logging in every day, and the existing setup wasn't holding up at that volume, especially during login surges at the start of a school year. Ollon deployed additional Okta agents to spread that authentication load and rearchitected the components most exposed to failure under heavy use, then validated the fix against real load with a full set of test cases. That capacity work meant the system could absorb peak login volume without small errors turning into district wide outages. The system was confirmed stable enough to hand back without needing ongoing support.

SSO Integrations

Students in a public school district needed to sign into Chromebooks and into services on Microsoft's Azure and Office 365 platforms using the same district credentials, not a separate login for every system. Ollon configured Chromebook single sign on through the district's Okta environment and finalized the Azure and Office 365 federation so those platforms recognized the same identity without a separate account to manage. That integration meant one login covered a student's device and their cloud based schoolwork, instead of IT staff maintaining separate credentials across each platform. Getting each integration working correctly was part of what let the broader identity system function the way the district needed.