Security or user experience? That’s a top-of-mind question for many enterprises these days as  they weigh protecting internal resources from bad actors against the frustration and decreased productivity that complex access barriers can induce. Achieving the right balance of security and seamless access can seem a daunting challenge.

You aren’t stuck in an either/or situation, however. Scotts Miracle-Gro recently updated their identity platform and in doing so, strengthened the digital enterprise’s security posture without compromising their agility.

Eliminating Risky Authentication
The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company is the world's largest marketer of consumer lawn and garden care products, marketing of popular brands including Miracle-Gro® and Ortho®. Their mission is to help consumers express themselves “by providing innovative products and solutions to create beautiful and healthy lawns and gardens.”

That innovation extends to how Scotts works internally as well. Scotts’ approximately 7,500 employees access dozens of SaaS, mobile, cloud and enterprise applications to perform their jobs. But until recently, the process they followed was a risky one: individuals would click external links through a shared web page.

Another drawback to the outdated and inefficient authentication process was that employees each used multiple passwords to log on to various applications. Users would forget their sign-on information and waste time with password recovery or resort to potentially unsafe practices such as writing down passwords or reusing them for multiple resources. Scotts knew this situation had to change.

Federated Single Sign-on
After researching single sign-on (SSO) technologies, Scotts chose PingFederate to provide employees with access to roughly 50 internal and external applications, including Google Apps, SAP, insurance sites and more, via a single set of credentials. PingFederate is the leading enterprise federation server for user authentication and standards-based SSO for employee, partner and customer identity types. Ping acts as the organization's authentication authority, performing user identification in a secure, controlled and centralized manner.

PingFederate integrates silos of identities and applications inside the enterprise, enabling SSO and identity federation, profile management and password reset, and adaptive authentication policies. And Ping’s open standards ensure a future-proofed identity architecture and enable interoperability between various resources, organizations and systems.

“With single sign-on, our employees experience fast, seamless authentication using a single set of secure corporate credentials,” said Joni Moss, Identity and Access Management Analyst at Scotts.

Today, Scotts Miracle-Gro employees can securely authenticate with one click to their critical applications with ease—significantly increasing the productivity of their workforce.

“Ping works seamlessly in the background to save our users time, and they don’t even know it,” said Moss. “It allows them to do their jobs as quickly and effectively as possible.”

To learn more, watch this short video as Joni Moss describes how Ping Identity helps Scotts Miracle-Gro centralize their identity services and increase their security posture.