Industry: Education technology
Identity disaster recovery for edtech and higher education
Edtech and university Okta tenants run learning management, student information, and research-grant systems on top of identity. FERPA, GLBA on the financial aid side, and a calendar built around semester rollover make identity stability non-negotiable.
What goes wrong
Three incidents you have already seen variations of
Semester-rollover SCIM feed corrupts student access
An overnight Workflows automation that rolled over course-section group memberships pushed an off-by-one term selector. Tens of thousands of students lost LMS access for the first day of classes.
FERPA-bound roster system loses provisioning rules
A directory cleanup removed group rules feeding the SIS-driven roster system. Faculty rosters drifted. Registrar reconciled manually for two weeks.
Research-portal access broken by IdP cert rotation
A signing-cert rotation on the campus IdP-of-record invalidated SAML trust to the federated research grant portal. PIs could not check submission status during a deadline week.
Regulatory shape
Compliance and audit angle
FERPA, GLBA (financial aid systems), HIPAA (campus health services), and increasingly state student-privacy laws all expect documented controls on the identity layer governing access to protected data. Butterfly's Audit Pack maps to FERPA Annual Notice §99.7 administrative safeguards and GLBA Safeguards Rule 16 CFR 314.4(d).
How Butterfly fits
The recovery layer for education technology identity
Butterfly captures the Okta resources that semester rollover, FERPA-bound roster feeds, research-portal federations, and campus health system access all depend on. Restore previews show exactly which student or faculty populations would be touched before any change goes live. Audit Pack PDF gives the registrar and the privacy office the evidence they need at the end of each term.
Frequently asked
FAQ
How does Butterfly handle semester rollover?
The cadence is configurable. Most universities snapshot daily during the term and increase frequency around add/drop and grade-posting windows. Restore preview lets the team revert a rollover step at the group-membership level.
Can Butterfly help with FERPA audit prep?
The Audit Pack PDF is framework-filterable. It maps to FERPA Annual Notice §99.7 administrative safeguards and surfaces change history and restore readiness for the access-control layer over student records.
Does Butterfly require us to give it global admin?
No. Butterfly installs via the Okta Integration Network with the minimum scopes required for backup and restore. The Trust Center documents each scope and why it is requested.
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