Allegiant Travel Company Soars High With Secure Single Sign-on

The Objective

Allegiant Travel Company is the parent company of Allegiant Air,  a low-low fares, nonstop, all-jet service with destinations throughout North America. The company has approximately 11,000 identities—individuals working for Allegiant who serve customers in a variety of capacities, including pilots, flight attendants, counter agents, baggage handlers, and customer service representatives.

While the majority of these identities are contractors and not employees, they all have access to the systems that are required to operate the airline. Therefore, the organization effectively treats each one of these individuals as an employee. Allegiant sought a more user-friendly and secure single sign-on (SSO) system to allow each employee fast and easy access to the applications they need.

The Challenge

Ineffective authentication was a primary challenge. Chris Gullett, Director of Information Assurance, says that when the company started ramping up an information security program, the first issue identified was the fact that every single system had a different username and password. Centralization of authentication and authorization didn’t exist, whether the application was in the cloud or local.

The Solution

Gullett said that when Allegiant spoke to other companies that had implemented authentication technologies, Ping kept coming up in the conversation as a leader. The company deployed PingFederate as its SSO solution, and Allegiant’s employees and partners now use PingFederate to access a dozen or so different cloud-based applications with a single username and password.

“Our first two applications were entirely important to every one of our employees, the first one being our human resources software,” Gullet said. “People wanted to see when their last paycheck was. The second application we brought on board was expense reporting. Right away, SSO takes away two different passwords and usernames that people have to remember on very common sites that they had to access all the time.”

Employees and contractors are accessing these and other apps via a wide range of devices. Most of Allegiant’s headquarters employees access internal applications via computers, but flight attendants and pilots typically do so via company-issued mobile tablets. Ping provides secure and seamless access, no matter the device.

“The technical implementation of PingFederate was very easy,” Gullett said. “Professional services at Ping were incredibly helpful, the product was very easy to stand up and has continued to be easy to operate. It’s got a low total cost of ownership when you look at the administrative side.”

The Result

The result is a simplified user experience for an increasing number of employee and contractor tasks. Since implementation, Allegiant has taken additional internal applications and tied them into existing centralized authentication and authorization services, while at the same time continuing to bring on a number of cloud-based services. Each one of those has incrementally been an important step in simplifying the user experience across the enterprise. Gullett said, “We were able to bring Ping in and install it quickly and implement it quickly and have it run without any problems—it has been great.”