Coalfire Securely Enables the Productivity of Their Mobile Workforce

The Objective

Coalfire is a cybersecurity company that helps public and private sector organizations avert threats, reduce risk and turn security into a competitive advantage.

The organization was driving forward a security initiative that included multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), and multi-device management. As the go-to partner prescribing cybersecurity recommendations for organizations across industries like healthcare, technology, and the public sector, Coalfire needed to ensure their environment could not only pass their own audits but also offer the highest level of security for their clients. The organization was moving toward a cloud-first strategy, and as a part of that, needed its workforce to be able to access Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud.

The Challenge

Coalfire had a set of cloud-based applications including Office 365 that created authentication challenges and risks. With on-premises AD and ADFS as their current solution, they needed to move to a more robust solution for federated SSO that was easier to administer and add new applications. Around 40% of Coalfire’s workforce is fully mobile, so the organization required a platform that would allow its employees to authenticate from multiple devices seamlessly. With 13 offices across the U.S. and the U.K., the team was also looking to remove its dependency on office-based servers.

The Solution

The Coalfire team selected the Ping Identity platform, leveraging PingFederate, PingID, and PingOne to migrate a range of applications off of ADFS and implement advanced authentication scenarios for applications including Box and Office 365.

As a partner to Microsoft, PingFederate is officially supported as a federation server for Azure Active Directory for secure, one-click access to applications such as Office 365. “Ultimately, we selected Ping over ADFS because of the need for security,” said Coalfire Project Manager Jackie Kramers. “Plus, what stood out for Ping was the affordability.”

Employees use the PingOne dock to seamlessly sign on to about 30 selected apps that are widely used across the organization. Coalfire leverages various authentication types, including email, SMS, and MFA.

“Our end users have a plethora of different use cases, so we did a lot of testing: Skype, Mail, and Sharepoint, on and off VPN, on different operating systems and browsers,” said Kramers. The Ping Professional Services team helped Coalfire configure the Ping platform and migrate the various ADFS SAML/WS-Federation Connections from ADFS to PingFederate. Kramers added, “It’s been an absolute pleasure working with our Ping solutions architect. Walter was key in getting us over some of our hurdles, and has provided us a great deal of expertise.”