Gates Provides Seamless and Secure Access to Over 6,500 Employees

Denver-based Gates Corporation is a leading global provider of application-specific fluid power and power transmission products, services and solutions. Starting as a family-owned business in 1911, Gates is now a major enterprise participating in many sectors of the industrial and consumer markets. From the most extreme environments to the more familiar, Gates is there with the right product, in the right place and at the right time.

But Gates was challenged to provide its workforce users with access to the right resources to do their jobs effectively. They had acquired a number of authentication mechanisms over the years, creating a complicated user access system. At the same time, the company’s phenomenal growth was making the inadequacies of its existing security program more evident than ever. So they hired their first Chief Information Security Officer, Sam Masiello, to modernize their legacy identity and access management (IAM) approach.
 
Masiello quickly identified the need to gain visibility across the company’s networks and systems, and most importantly, simplify authentication. But with a spectrum of workforce applications in play—both on-premises and in the cloud—and no single source of truth about users, building out the foundation for the company’s new security program would prove to be a tall order.

The Search for a Global Authentication Authority
Masiello knew he needed to eliminate Gates’ multiple authentication systems and bring them under a single global authentication authority if the company was going to succeed at streamlining application access for its workforce. Masiello did his due diligence by vetting several vendors, looking for a flexible, standards-based solution that could:

• Enable single sign-on (SSO)
• Provide a single directory store of users
• Decrease provisioning time and errors
• Support both in-house and SaaS applications
   

As Masiello continued to modernize Gates’ security program, he would also need a solution capable of accommodating an evolving number of on-prem and SaaS applications, but without creating any additional complexity for the users or the team that would eventually be tasked with managing ongoing IAM requirements.
 

Problem Solved with the Ping Intelligent Identity Platform
Masiello found the workforce SSO, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and directory capabilities he needed in the Ping Intelligent Identity Platform. He also appreciated Ping’s ease of deployment and flexibility to support both on-premises and SaaS applications, as well as a multitude of integrations and partnerships.
 
The Ping Intelligent Identity Platform provides the global authentication authority Gates needs to deliver access for over 6,500 workforce users. PingOne and PingFederate enable a single login to create seamless, secure access for Gates’ users—wherever they’re located and on any device—while PingID’s adaptive MFA ensures each user is who they claim to be. Finally, PingDirectory helps Masiello and his team store and manage all of their personnel data in a centralized data repository.
 
With one-click deactivation, Masiello’s team can automatically provision and deprovision users from applications. And the employee directory gives the team critical visibility into who is using the network and how. Just as Gates strives to be there for its customers with the right product, in the right place and at the right time, their security team can now ensure the right people have access to the right resources, at the right time and from anywhere.
 
Supported by the Ping Intelligent Identity Platform, Gates is able to:

• Streamline user access and provisioning/deprovisioning
• Extend SSO across all applications through Ping’s standards-based platform
• Increase security of the entire enterprise through greater visibility
• Lay the foundation for future growth through Ping’s integrations and partnerships
   

“Ping has allowed us to expand our perimeter by identifying who is accessing our network and where our people are working, even if they are off site or off network,” Masiello explains. “Ping has also positioned us to branch out from internal identity management to provide the same seamless experience for our customers, partners and vendors.”
 
To learn more about how Gates uses the Ping Intelligent Identity Platform to enable and support global authentication, read the complete customer story.