Land O’Lakes Cultivates Productivity with Seamless Identity Federation

Objective

As the second-largest food and agricultural cooperative in the U.S., Land O’Lakes needed to simplify access for 9,000 employees and 300,000+ dairy farmers. The objective was to implement a vendor-agnostic, standards-based identity solution that would reduce password fatigue, lower administrative costs, and improve the mobile experience.

Challenge

User adoption of new cloud tools dropped as login complexity increased. The IT team was bogged down by password reset tickets and manual integration work. Their initial attempt to customize a .NET Framework for SAML 2.0 proved too slow to keep up with the business's need for new SaaS applications.

Solution

Land O’Lakes chose PingFederate to act as their primary Identity Provider (IdP). This allowed them to federate to external service providers and bridge the gap between proprietary internal standards and modern open standards like OAuth and SAML. The solution provides secure access to on-premises and cloud-based apps at desks or on mobile devices (iPads and Androids) via a secure identity bridge.

Results

The deployment transformed the user experience from fragmented to invisible. By providing Single Sign-On (SSO), Land O’Lakes significantly reduced the number of credentials employees must manage. Integration time for new apps dropped from weeks to days (or even minutes). The cooperative now supports 6,500 users with a set and forget infrastructure that scales to meet the needs of their nationwide member-owners and partners.