On May 21, 2026, Microsoft published a customer story detailing a landmark deployment in Brazil’s education sector. Senac-RS, a professional education institution in Rio Grande do Sul, migrated over 120,000 annual students and more than 5,000 academic devices to Microsoft 365, Microsoft Entra ID, and Microsoft Intune for Education. The result is a resilient, cloud-first identity and device management framework that keeps learning running—even when on-premises infrastructure fails.

Senac-RS operates dozens of campuses across the state, offering vocational and technical courses to a student body that fluctuates with each enrollment cycle. Before the migration, the IT team faced a patchwork of legacy tools. User accounts were managed manually or through disjointed directories. Devices ran various operating systems with inconsistent configurations. Password resets flooded the helpdesk. When a server went down, local authentication broke, locking students and instructors out of critical resources.

The institution needed a modern solution that could handle scale, agility, and security without burdening a lean IT staff. That’s where Microsoft’s integrated cloud stack came in.

The Foundation: Microsoft 365 Education

Microsoft 365 Education provided the collaborative foundation. Students and faculty gained access to Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Office apps with 1 TB of personal storage per user. But the real transformation lay in identity and endpoint management.

Centralizing Identity with Microsoft Entra ID

With Microsoft Entra ID—the rebranded and expanded evolution of Azure Active Directory—Senac-RS centralized user identities. Every student and staff member received a single sign-on (SSO) credential, protected by multi-factor authentication and conditional access policies. Entra ID’s cloud-native architecture meant authentication services remained available even if a campus network experienced an outage. That resilience was critical for a region occasionally affected by severe weather and power instability.

Entra ID also enabled self-service password reset, slashing helpdesk call volume. Governance features like access reviews and entitlement management ensured that temporary accounts for visiting instructors or short-term students were automatically deprovisioned, reducing security risks. The platform’s B2B collaboration features allowed Senac-RS to securely invite external partners without creating shadow IT accounts.

The move to Entra ID also aligned with Brazil’s LGPD data protection law, thanks to the service’s compliance certifications—ISO 27001, SOC 2, and HIPAA—which gave the institution confidence that student and staff data would be handled according to strict standards.

Endpoint Management at Scale with Intune for Education

For devices, Senac-RS turned to Microsoft Intune for Education. Designed specifically for schools, Intune allows IT admins to manage Windows, iOS, iPadOS, and Android from a single console. The team configured enrollment profiles so that new devices—laptops, tablets, and lab PCs—could be unboxed, connected to the internet, and automatically provisioned with the right settings, apps, and security baselines. Zero-touch deployment via Windows Autopilot became the norm.

Intune’s compliance policies gave Senac-RS real-time visibility into device health. If a device fell out of compliance—missing updates, jailbroken, lacking antivirus—conditional access could block it from Microsoft 365 resources until remediated. For a school managing thousands of shared devices in labs and libraries, this automated enforcement shifted security from reactive to proactive.

The education-specific features in Intune proved decisive. The “Take a Test” profile allowed instructors to lock down devices for standardized assessments, preventing access to unauthorized apps and websites. Shared device mode, a capability of both Entra ID and Intune, let students log in and out quickly on communal PCs while keeping their data separate and ephemeral. This was a game-changer for labs that see up to 30 different users a day.

Migration and Adoption

The migration unfolded over several months. Microsoft FastTrack and a local partner assisted Senac-RS with planning, data migration, and adoption. The IT team first piloted a small group of courses, refining policies before scaling campus-wide. By the time the first semester under the new system concluded, nearly all academic devices were enrolled, and over 90% of student accounts had been migrated. The remaining stragglers—largely inactive alumni accounts—were archived.

Instructors and students received brief training sessions, but the intuitive nature of Microsoft 365 meant adoption curves were short. The IT director noted that “once users experienced the simplicity of single sign-on and automatic file syncing across devices, there was no going back.”

Measurable Impact

The impact was measurable. Helpdesk tickets related to access and passwords dropped by an estimated 40% within the first six months. Device deployment time for new semesters shrank from days to hours. Instructors reported fewer disruptions during lessons, as single sign-on eliminated the multi-password headache. Students could pick up any school-owned device, log in with their school credentials, and instantly access their personalized desktop and OneDrive files—what Microsoft calls “identity-driven productivity.”

Security posture improved dramatically. Before the migration, Senac-RS had limited insight into device compliance. Post-migration, the team could enforce encryption, require screen lock timeouts, and block execution of untrusted apps across the entire fleet. In one incident, a lost staff laptop was remotely wiped via Intune within 30 minutes, preventing potential data exposure.

Cost savings, though not explicitly detailed in the published story, are a common byproduct. Consolidating onto Microsoft’s education-licensed bundle—likely Microsoft 365 A5 for faculty and A3 for students—reduced the need for third-party antivirus, backup, and helpdesk tools. The shift to cloud-based management also eliminated the expense of maintaining multiple on-premises servers.

Resilience in Action

The resilience factor cannot be overstated. In Rio Grande do Sul, where storms can knock out local power and connectivity, the ability to continue working offline and then sync seamlessly when reconnected meant classes could proceed with minimal disruption. Entra ID’s Primary Refresh Token caching ensures users can authenticate even without a constant internet connection, while Intune’s offline compliance checks enforce policies locally. One instructor recounted how a thunderstorm knocked out the campus network during a critical exam, but students continued uninterrupted because all necessary apps and data were already cached.

A Blueprint for Education IT

The Senac-RS story underscores a broader trend in education IT: the move from device-centric to identity-centric architectures. By decoupling user identity from hardware, institutions can support a mix of device types while maintaining consistent security and access policies. That flexibility is crucial as schools blend in-person, hybrid, and remote learning models.

Microsoft has been aggressively positioning its education cloud for such scenarios. Entra ID now boasts over 610 million monthly active users across commercial and education clouds. Intune for Education, launched in 2017 and continuously refined, serves tens of millions of student devices globally. The Senac-RS deployment highlights how these tools, when stitched together, create a coherent fabric that’s both powerful and relatively simple to administer.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, Senac-RS has signaled plans to deepen its use of Microsoft’s analytics and security stack. Microsoft Intune’s Endpoint Analytics and the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center can provide insights into app health, crash rates, and device performance, allowing proactive hardware refreshes. They also plan to explore Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, integrated with Intune, to add advanced threat detection for macOS and Windows devices. Additionally, the integration with Microsoft Education Insights in Teams already allows the institution to correlate device usage data with academic engagement, giving administrators early warning when a student might be disengaging.

The Microsoft Customer Story page for Senac-RS includes quotes from the institution’s IT leadership, who emphasized the “peace of mind” that comes with knowing the system “just works.” For educators and students, that reliability is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. When a lab of 30 learners sits down for a timed exam, there’s no room for authentication errors or misconfigured policies.

“We moved from a fragile, server-dependent setup to a cloud-native identity and device management model,” the IT director said. “Now, even if our internet link fluctuates, users can still authenticate using cached credentials and access offline-capable apps. The resilience is remarkable.”

For IT managers in education around the world, the Senac-RS story is a practical blueprint. It proves that with the right cloud tools, institutions can transform their IT from a bottleneck into an enabler—all while staying within the security and compliance boundaries that modern education demands.