Information Technology | News
Columbia Prep Centralizes Mac Management, Security
- By Mike Hohenbrink
- 11/30/11
New York-based Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School (Columbia Prep) will be centralizing management and security to address the needs of its growing population of Mac users among students and faculty.
Columbia Prep will utilize the Centrify Suite to manage the school’s Mac community within Microsoft Active Directory, which provides a central repository for user accounts. The move allows the school to control access and manage user preferences for more than 450 Mac users.
"Other solutions would have required multiple Mac servers which we would have been unable to virtualize," said Adam Gerson, co-director of technology at Columbia Prep. "With Centrify, we don't need additional servers to manage our Mac environment. The bottom line is Centrify gives us a single way to authenticate our user population across a mixed Mac and Windows environment and does so in a simpler and more reliable way."
Key features of the Centrify Suite include:
- Secure authentication;
- Single sign-on;
- Role-based access control;
- Identity management;
- Server isolation; and
- Encryption of data-in-motion.
To save time and overhead, the school will also take advantage of Centrify's group policy capabilities to allow centralized management of user preferences and configure them in accordance with school policies and acceptable use limits rather than manually configuring each individual computer.
Columbia Prep, a non-sectarian school founded in 1764, serves approximately 1,200 students in grades preK-12 with an endowment of $22 million.
For more information about Centrify visit centrify.com.