In times of crisis, response speed is vital. And in today’s world, fast access to online applications can literally be a matter of life and death.

That’s the case for a national humanitarian group, whose large workforce of employees and volunteers provides emergency services during catastrophes. The workforce needs to be able to quickly and securely access data, systems and more, and for the past decade the organization has been using PingFederate to offer secure, one-click access to critical on-premises resources.

But as the computing environment has changed, so have the group’s needs:

• The rise of the cloud. Institutions increasingly are implementing cloud-first initiatives to save costs and improve quality of service. The organization was in the midst of moving more applications to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, including an increased deployment of  applications within Azure. They were setting up additional servers to improve response and high availability across their data centers for their users, and needed a scalable single sign-on (SSO) and authentication solution to support these environments.
  
  
• Increased security threats. According to recent Gartner research, “Security leaders are grappling with an ever-shifting threat landscape. These leaders are facing increasingly sophisticated hackers and attacks more frequently.” This national humanitarian group was using a third-party password management solution that was costly and difficult to maintain. In addition, the organization relies on security software from CyberArk, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) wasn't available for access into CyberArk.

This shifting environment was affecting the organization’s needs. They required secure SSO and authentication authority so that users can seamlessly and securely access cloud and other resources, and an adaptive MFA solution so that they could rest easy knowing that the users are who they say they are. 

PingFederate and PingID for Today’s Computing Environment

As the organization began rolling to a hybrid cloud, they implemented unlimited deployment of PingFederate servers to protect critical resources. Along with providing a federated SSO system that meets their desired high availability architecture needs, this allowed them to enable single sign-on to the apps they moved to the Azure cloud infrastructure. It also sets them up for sign-on success with any apps they may wish to move to Azure (or any other cloud system, such as Adobe Web Services) in the future. 

End users are also able to leverage Ping’s password management capabilities. Many in the organization’s workforce, and especially those who do not access applications regularly (such as volunteers), tend to forget their passwords. So now, instead of calling up a help desk within a legacy password system, the workforce is able to manage their passwords by themselves—a better user experience at a decreased cost. 

The organization also added PingID, an adaptive MFA solution that balances secure access with ease of use, to the mix. The initial deployment is for users who are accessing CyberArk; it increases their level of security and simplifies the user experience, all while supporting a variety of devices.

In short:
 

• The new infrastructure meets the organization’s transaction volumes and supports the move to the hybrid cloud.
• The federated SSO model enables key players to have SSO and authentication across all their applications and environments.
• The organization realizes multiple benefits like ease of use and deployment, integration with their existing Ping environments, and the quality of the support and products.
   

To learn more about how Ping can help your organization move to the cloud, please download our ebook “Enterprise Cloud IAM.”