Our product vision and 2025 roadmap for protecting K-12 identities

In today’s rapidly evolving educational landscape, security is at the forefront of every decision we make at Clever. Protecting classrooms from new and emerging threats is not just about safeguarding data—it’s about ensuring uninterrupted learning for students, teachers, and staff. After countless conversations with school leaders and educators, it’s clear that managing these threats, while also supporting diverse learning needs, is a growing challenge. These insights have directly shaped our roadmap for 2025, with a sharpened focus on equipping schools with the right tools to protect and streamline their technology ecosystems.

As we look to the future, our mission extends beyond simply addressing today’s needs. We are deeply committed to building solutions that empower you—educators, IT leaders, and application providers—to overcome the complexities of integrating systems, securing sensitive data, and supporting the diverse identities within school communities. This post will dive deeper into the specific advancements you can expect in 2025 and how Clever’s long-term vision will continue to evolve to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Together, we can create a safer, more connected learning environment for everyone.

Clever – The Identity Platform for Schools

Every digital identity in a school represents a real person—students, teachers, administrators, librarians, and the family members who support them. These identities unlock devices, provide access to schedules, grades, and attendance, and can open doors to endless learning opportunities. But to truly deliver on that promise, schools need a single platform to manage and protect every digital identity. That’s where Clever comes in.

With a unified digital identity from Clever, the right members of every school community have secure access to the right resources, ensuring a seamless and safe experience for all. By reducing glitches and preventing cyber threats, we help schools provide uninterrupted learning across all age groups. Clever is uniquely designed for the needs of K-12 education, empowering schools to meet today’s challenges while accelerating learning for every student.

Our vision includes three pillars which will enable us to deliver a best-in-class experience as the Identity Platform for Schools. 

3 Pillars of Clever’s Product Vision

1. Secure all identities: Layered security, identity, and access management for the entire school community.
2. Control all data: One place to control all of your integrations and the data you share with applications.
3. Power classroom learning: Make it easy and safe for everyone to engage with the programs you’ve invested in.

Secure All Identities

Clever solutions advance digital learning by keeping student identities secure, centrally managed, and automatically connected to their tools, ensuring that the classrooms run smoothly and that learning is uninterrupted. Application partners also benefit from a unified identity framework, making it easier to onboard customers, safeguard districts, and quickly engage learners.

• Account Claiming in Clever IDM – Clever IDM is new and improved this year with functionality to help you with account lifecycle management as well as a suite of new account claim workflows combined with powerful Secure Password Management tools to help your users securely access new accounts and ensure they are continuously protected with strong passwords. No more losing sleep over weak credentials! See a demo for Clever IDM.
• Classroom MFA protection for and within Entra ID – This year, we launched an MFA solution uniquely designed for the classroom with the everyday experiences of students and teachers in mind. This means second factors that don’t require a cell phone and troubleshooting tools delegated to your teachers. Classroom MFA already protects the Clever portal, plus Google and Chromebooks. Your students can actually MFA into their programs with classroom-friendly, device-less second factors like Badges, login pictures, and six-digit PINs. New this year, we’re releasing an integration with Entra ID to have Clever supported as an external authentication method for Entra logins. See a demo for Classroom MFA.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Clever – We’re making roles more customizable so that you’ll have thorough control of permissions in Clever, and in the future, those could be pushed to outside partners for more automated access.

When digital access challenges can create both system vulnerabilities and interruptions in learning, it can be hard to know how to prioritize. At Clever, we’re bringing innovations that deliver seamless and secure identity and access management, that doesn’t make you compromise on security or accessibility.

Control All Data

With costly and disruptive cyber threats on the rise, schools and vendors alike need a holistic approach to security and data privacy. Our focus on interoperability ensures that our solutions work together in harmony, delivering a unified approach to identity and data security. For districts, this means efficient, secure systems that protect students while equipping educators and administrators with the right tools. For application providers, it means faster, safer integration with schools, ensuring learning is uninterrupted and accessible.

• Data control center – We’re making it possible for Clever to be your data control center. To start, we’re improving how you get data into Clever. Custom data makes it easier to upload any sort of data into Clever and manage it with greater flexibility.
• Clever LMS Connect – Manage how you share that data by consolidating your connections through Clever. Clever Secure Sync Rostering is your one integration between your SIS and applications, and Clever LMS Connect makes it just as easy to extend that integration to sync your gradebooks and assignments between LMSes and applications. See a demo for Clever LMS Connect.
• Attendance data – We’re expanding the types of data that we can ingest and send to application partners (at your discretion) – including attendance data.

With IT staffing shortages across districts, efficiency is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. Systems must work seamlessly together, reducing administrative overhead and allowing educators and IT teams to focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional learning experiences.

Power Classroom Learning

At the end of the day, everything that we do is to support learning. Our unified system brings all of your data into one place, then shares it with your applications via a single integration. This ultimately leads to kids having secure access to their programs when they need it — in one powerful place designed to boost classroom engagement and empower teachers.

• Substitute access – With teacher vacancies increasing, it’s critical that we provide regular access to learning tools for substitutes. By providing temporary login codes for substitute teachers, they can keep learning going from within Clever.
• Enhanced Teacher Portal – The new and improved Clever Portal you know and love! With more customizations, faster load times, and powerful troubleshooting tools, we created the most seamless digital classroom experience to help teachers and students stay focused on learning.

When schools and applications integrate through Clever, each community member has secure access to the resources they need, classrooms run without disruptions, and learning becomes the focus, not technology.

A future-ready solution

As we look ahead, Clever is committed to building secure, scalable systems that not only support the needs of schools and application providers today but enable them to thrive in the future. Together, we can protect every identity, advance digital learning, and ultimately accelerate learning for all.