Education

Pittsburg State University

Public university meets Disaster Recovery requirements for their distributed authentication infrastructure.

Pittsburg State University, also known as Pitt State, is a public university located in southeast Kansas.

The school has more than 200 undergraduate and graduate academic programs serving approximately 7,500 students. The focus of the university is the development of the total person – academic, aesthetic, spiritual, social and physical. Pitt State was founded in 1903 and is situated on 223 acres in rural Crawford County.

We placed one ADFS server in Pittsburg, Kansas, and a second one at a sister university’s datacenter, Wichita State University, across the state. The two are connected via the Kansas Research and Education Network, but are capable of operating independently.

Timothy Pearson

Assistant Director, Office of Information Services

Challenge

Disaster Risk

Located in Kansas, Pitt State operates in an area known as “Tornado Alley,” where severe weather can cause widespread damage to power and communications infrastructure.

Campus Availability

The university needed to ensure that critical campus technology and cloud-based services would remain accessible even if the main campus became unavailable.

Authentication Dependency

ADFS provides students with access to local and remotely hosted IT services, making the authentication infrastructure a critical part of the university’s Disaster Recovery strategy.

Solution

Pitt State deployed redundant Active Directory and ADFS infrastructure at a sister university in Kansas and used Total Uptime’s cloud platform to provide failover and load balancing across geographically distributed authentication servers.

Geographic Redundancy

ADFS infrastructure was distributed between Pittsburg State University and Wichita State University across the state.

Cloud Failover

Total Uptime provides automated failover so authentication requests can continue even if the main campus becomes unavailable.

ADFS Load Balancing

The Total Uptime platform also balances authentication requests across geographically distributed ADFS servers.

Results

Disaster Recovery

Authentication services can remain available even if the main campus goes offline.

Geographic Redundancy

ADFS infrastructure is distributed across two university data centers.

High Availability

Redundant infrastructure helps maintain access to critical IT services.

Simple & Cost Effective

The university describes the solution as simple, straightforward, highly distributed, and highly redundant.

Products Used

Cloud Load Balancing

Distribute traffic to any cloud or device with full control.

Cloud Failover

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