As one of the administrators of the Ping Identity platform at eBay, I am thrilled to share our story with the community at the upcoming IDENTIFY conference in San Francisco. I hope that our experience and plans for the future can help guide others toward more secure and improved user experiences for their own employees, partners and customers. Before diving into a preview [join me at IDENTIFY for the whole story!] of our plans for “MFA Everywhere,” I thought it could be helpful to share some our history with Ping.

Ebay’s relationship with Ping Identity began in 2011 and has been on the upswing ever since. For close to a decade, Ping has been helping us improve productivity and reduce integration efforts by connecting of our workforce and partner users to a diverse set of internally developed (homegrown) and commercial applications. And as cloud deployment and SaaS options have matured, we’ve been able to leverage our investments to continue to offer seamless access no matter where resources are deployed and hosted.

Balancing Security and Convenience at eBay
Security is always top of mind at eBay. We are diligent about implementing identity and security solutions according to best practices, and we’ve taken advantage of the broad open standards support within the Ping platform. But as security can often come with a productivity cost, we’ve been careful not to become too heavy handed in our efforts to protect our variety of resources and user populations. Which is why the new wave of modern, user friendly MFA methods that take advantage contextual factors and broad smartphone adoption was appealing when we first began reviewing these solutions in 2015. And as you can probably guess, by the end of 2015 we were sold on the value proposition of Ping Identity’s MFA solution, PingID.

In order to achieve quick wins for security, we began by offering these new methods to user populations who would immediately see the value. Of course, i’m referring to those already burdened with secure, but less than optimal user experiences from our legacy MFA providers. Historically, these users were asked to use a hard token with a rotating pin when they needed to access resources from outside the office. Most commonly this access took place via SSH applications or through a VPN. The resulting productivity impacts of increased security in this case were not small. For example:

• Lockouts due to a single possession factor as the only MFA option were common
• Forgotten pins, tokens and passcodes increased the burden on our helpdesk
• Significant labor costs were required to maintain, patch and upgrade business-critical MFA infrastructure