How many employee applications do you think your enterprise has? 30? 75? 100 or more? Would it surprise you to know that the number likely is pushing 1,000—for cloud apps alone? It would certainly surprise most CIOs; last year’s Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec said that while the average enterprise organization was using 928 cloud apps, “most CIOs think their organizations only use around 30 or 40 cloud apps.” (1)

Now, imagine trying to get all those applications modernized to meet the needs of today’s workforce.

Then consider what it takes to add to even more apps to an already convoluted environment.  

And then think about how much time is being wasted when your employees struggle with legacy systems that weren’t built to accommodate mobile apps, modern protocols, remote employees, complex partnerships and other realities of today’s digital enterprise. 

For one Fortune 100 insurance company, the unsupportable nature of their computing environment was painfully clear, especially regarding their legacy WAM system. They were struggling with outdated federation and access security—until they implemented Ping technology.

The Dangers of “Do Your Own Thing”

The firm, one of the country’s largest personal and commercial insurance providers, had long been wrestling with legacy identity and access management (IAM) performance problems that hampered user productivity, along with excessive support, license and administrative costs. But the primary driver for updating their system was the drawn-out process or even near impossibility in deploying secure, centralized roll-out and access to diverse cloud, API, mobile and other apps. 

Specifically, their solutions needed an overhaul. The company had been a long-time user of WAM but was growing increasingly frustrated over deteriorating support and lack of innovation. The environment was not meeting their enterprise scale requirements, and the firm found it difficult to add new connections and manage integrations. 

As a result, the company had a queue of people ready to onboard new apps, and the global cybersecurity group couldn’t service them quickly enough. This led to business owners who were so frustrated they were going out and “doing their own thing,” adding applications in a piecemeal, non-holistic, non-centralized process, which further contributed to a complex, unsustainable and potentially insecure environment.

Ping Identity’s IAM Solutions

The company knew they needed to modernize their IAM environment in order to be able to greatly improve app development and end-user productivity, while significantly reducing legacy IAM costs. In addition, they required support for modern app and cloud initiatives while continuing IAM services to legacy app portfolios. 

After evaluating several leading identity platforms, the company selected Ping Identity for their identity and access management solutions. During the Proof of Concept, they realized that Ping’s modern solution, built on open standards, would provide employees and partners with seamless and secure access, and that Ping’s out-of-the-box integrations made for a much safer solution than some of the others demonstrated. Because of their confidence in Ping's offerings, the relationship and trust established with the Ping team, and the organizational thought leadership they witnessed at Identiverse (formerly Cloud Identity Summit), they choose Ping technology for their single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA) and access security needs.

Today more than 60,000 employees access the resources they need anytime, anywhere, on any device, and the organization is able to lower costs, improve security and better support their new digital business initiatives. The company is also looking at ways to extend this technology to nearly 4 million consumer identities. 

To learn how Ping can help your organization upgrade your outdated legacy WAM solution, please contact us.

(1) Tom Sullivan, “CIOs have no clue how many cloud apps their employees use,” Healthcare IT News, April 27, 2017