Active Directory

The services and information below are aimed at the Penn IT professionals. For getting IT support, please go to the Get IT Help section on this website.

Overview

KITE is the ISC-managed Enterprise Active Directory service for Penn Campus.  KITE contains more than 300,000 user, group, and computer objects and manages authorization and authentication for centralized applications, services, and systems including departmental desktops & laptops, research & classroom labs, VPN devices, virtual desktop computing, and cloud services.

KITE is integrated with many ISC services, including PennKey, and Grouper.  This allows PennKey holders to utilize file and print sharing, object management (users, groups, printers, computers, servers, and policy objects), and business logic policies as well as with Penn Community.

Clients who rely on KITE can share management of their resource management responsibilities with our service staff or allow our staff to fully manage their resources.

College Hall with statue of Benjamin Franklin

Benefits

  • Centralized Identity Lifecycle Management (IdLM) - PennName based accounts are created, disabled, and removed based on information provided by Workday @Penn for staff and faculty, and SRFS Banner for students.
  • Grouper Integration - Dynamic authorization based on your school or centers needs to your applications, ensuring the right people have access.
  • Lower cost - By leveraging KITE, covered under PTIC, you are moving the cost of maintaining core identity services to ISC.  This frees up your budget to focus on roles core to your school or center’s needs.
  • One identity - Accounts are mapped in KITE to their PennKey, integrating authentication so a user can login to Microsoft services with their PennKey. Passwords for PennKey accounts are synchronized between PennKey and KITE Active Directory. This synchronization will reduce the burden of managing multiple passwords for KITE and PennKey users, and improve user experience for services dependent on Active Directory.
    • PennKey Registation – is integrated with KITE. When your PennKey is registered your KITE account (if eligible) will also be created with the same username/password.
    • PennKey Password Reset – When you reset your PennKey password it will be synchronized with your KITE account maintaining a single password across both services.

Target Audience

University faculty, staff, and students

Funding Type

Direct Billed
PTIC

Rates

This service is primarily funded by Allocated Funds as recommended by the Penn Technology Investment Committee (PTIC); however charge-backs are applied for some components.

PTIC covered service components include:

  • Ongoing maintenance

Charge-back components include:

  • Project-related costs for implementing new ADs.
  • A one-time labor fee will be charged to migrate accounts and resources from a client AD to the KITE AD service. Standard ISC labor rates will be applied.

ISC rate increases are generally aligned with University increases.

SLA

View Service Level Agreement

Additional Information & Resources

Kite for Penn IT Staff
Using Kite as an account resource forest

Related Services

PennO365
Systems Support & Consulting
Virtual Desktop

Client Care

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