The Future of Instructure Technology with Global Identity Service

[MichaelLysaght]

As we approach InstructureCon 2025, I am reflecting upon the progress we’ve made since last year when we promised to modernize the Instructure platform to ensure that we can innovate faster and deliver the capabilities you need to keep pace with the changing landscape of education. The pace of change in the education landscape has not slowed and our commitment to modernizing the platform is steadfast. 

Today, I’ll update you on some major progress on one of these projects: the Global Identity Service. And offer details of what you can expect over the next 12-28 months.  

The Vision for a Global Identity Service

The Global Identity Service is a key part of our platform's future and will simplify how you interact with all Instructure products, starting with Canvas and expanding to all Instructure products. Imagine:

• Educators logging into both their teaching and professional development areas with just one username and password.
• Administrators easily managing users for connected apps in one centralized place. 
• Students gathering all their learning achievements across connected accounts into a single place.
• Managing users across Canvas Trusts and Consortiums becomes easier with centralized identity management.

These are just a few examples of how we envision this service could save time and add value. While they are not on our short term roadmap, the Global Identity service makes this vision a possibility in the future.  By enabling a single login across our product portfolio we're paving the way for:

• Smoother integrations and easier scalability thanks to standardized authentication.
• Quicker updates, more organized data, and the introduction of AI-powered features.
• Stronger security measures and simplified system administration.
• More insightful reporting and analytics with a unique user ID

Delivering a Global Identity Service

Our guiding principles for delivering the Global Identity service are to unlock added value and increased security for our customers while ensuring the least amount of disruption to your end users. 

To minimize any risk of disruption, we’ve done extensive testing on Instructure hosted sites such as Free for Teacher and with early adopters in a variety of regions and configurations. By the end of July, when we slowly begin redirecting logins through the identity service, we will have thoroughly tested at scale.  

Additionally, we have built in fail-safes in the event of any hiccups to ensure there are no disruptions for students during the back-to-school window.   Finally, we are taking an incremental approach to delivery, making sure that we have validated checkpoints for migration and consolidation. 

Change management Expectations for your Institution

At every step along the modernization process, we strive to minimize disruption and change for your institution.  To that end, we have taken steps to minimize any additional actions that will be required by admins, and where changes are needed, provide options for when and how to make those changes.  With that in mind, here is a big picture view of what to expect over the next 12-18 months to make global identity and high level details of what, when and why there will be change. 

• Already, we have sent out a new subprocessor notification, which includes  the benefits of deploying a new service provider, along with technical references. You can find out more in the Community.
• Currently, a login UI with a more accessible UI is available as an option now, and can be enabled at your convenience in both Beta and Production environments. More details on the new login UI can be found in the release notes.  This will be automatically turned on for all customers in July 2026.  
• Starting in July and throughout the next several months, we will begin redirecting current login workflows on the backend to go through the new identity service.  You will receive notice in advance of the redirection and will have an opportunity to validate the back-end change before the re-direction 
• After a period of successful logins at scale for your Institution, we will make available tools to help reconfigure any current SSO implementations to point directly to the new service. Expect  more information on this later this year. 
• Over time, as we release enhancements to identity and user management tools, we will make them available to admins. We will continue to communicate these via release notes and Community posts as we get closer to release.  
• If you have questions, please refer to Frequently Asked Questions or contact your customer success manager. 

We are excited to continue modernizing our technology and look forward to the benefits this will bring as we build a more flexible, seamless, and secure platform.  I look forward to meeting many of you at InstructureCon 2025 where I’ll share more about Instructure’s tech modernization plans and appreciate hearing your experience and ideas.