The Office of Cybersecurity announced in an email to the Vanderbilt community on March 10 that the university will be replacing PING and Duo Mobile with Okta SSO and Okta Verify, two services offered by the San Francisco-based company Okta, Inc. Accounts associated with a Vanderblit login have been divided into 11 groups and will migrate to Okta in phases between March 31 and July 25.
Applications such as Office 365 and Zoom are in group B, which will begin migration on April 7, while all YES logins are in group K — the last group — with migration starting on July 21. A complete list of all accounts that will transition can be found on the Office of Cybersecurity website.
“Okta provides advanced authentication to help keep your account and data safe,” the IT Cybersecurity email reads. “[Okta will also provide] self-service convenience — easily reset passwords and manage device enrollments without IT assistance.”
Okta will allow Vanderbilt students to switch between applications without needing to login multiple times, according to a statement from the Office of Cybersecurity. The switch will be part of VTrust, a program aimed to modernize university cybersecurity, and it comes amidst the university’s transition from Google products to Microsoft 365 that will begin this summer.
“VTrust is designed to provide a cybersafe information environment to strengthen the university’s digital security and protect from cyber threats,” a representative from the Office of Cybersecurity said in an email to The Hustler. “This upgrade aims to provide a faster, more secure and user-friendly experience for accessing business applications [and] reinforcing Vanderbilt’s commitment to a cybersafe environment.”
First-year Megh Dixit said he had heard about the change but didn’t care much about it.
“[The current Duo Mobile system is] efficient. It’s fast. It’s kind of annoying though that you have to sign in twice,” Dixit said. “If [Okta’s] is a lot faster, then I guess it’s fine, but if you still have to do it twice, I feel like it’s just kind of the same at that point.”
A number of other universities currently use the system, including the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin System. Saint Louis University and Harvard University also announced this year that they would migrate their login systems to Okta, according to their respective websites.
