Scotts Increases Security Posture with Federated Single Sign-On

Objective

As the world’s largest marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products, Scotts Miracle-Gro needed to secure its digital enterprise without compromising business agility. The objective was to implement an identity platform that allowed employees across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific to seamlessly sign on to a rapidly expanding portfolio of SaaS applications.

Challenge

Scotts was relying on ineffective authentication methods for mission-critical applications. Internal users were forced to navigate a shared web page of links to access the tools they needed. With most of their modern applications requiring SAML 2.0, Scotts knew their manual, decentralized approach was not a long-term solution and posed a risk to their security posture.

Solution

Scotts selected PingFederate for its extensibility and industry-leading support for modern standards. Ping Identity now acts as the organization’s central authentication authority, identifying users in a secure and controlled manner. This enables 7,500 employees to use a single set of credentials to access 50+ diverse resources, including mobile, cloud, and enterprise apps like Google Apps, SAP, and various insurance sites.

Results

The implementation has successfully centralized identity services and increased Scotts' overall security posture. Employees can now authenticate to critical applications with ease, leading to a significant increase in productivity. By utilizing an extensible, hybrid identity platform based on open standards, Scotts has created a future-proofed architecture that allows the company to continue innovating and maintaining interoperability across varied systems.