The Village of Westmont is a great community in the western suburbs of Chicago of about 25,000 people. The need for two factor authentication has become a reality in this day and age with the number of attacks that have happened to corporate America and to governmental agencies. The user base that we have is a wide variety from full time employees to part time employees, police, fire, Council members, and residents that sit on committees. The level of knowledge ranges drastically from the top to the bottom.
From the police department side, we do have a two factor authentication requirement for computers that are not in a secure environment. We needed a way to cover both our internal machines, our external machines, mobile devices, all of that became a real challenge in trying to find a solution that would encompass all of those technologies and provide as much of a seamless environment as we can get. The idea here was to provide a solution that hopefully is easy for every user that's accessing the network.
So we selected Password Manager, Defender, and Cloud Access Manager as a suite of solutions. By selecting all three solutions from a single vendor, we were able to get better support in implementing these solutions as they knew how each piece worked.
We chose Defender because it provided all the solutions we needed, from cloud based security, remote access security, mobile devices, and ultimately it was easy for us to implement internally.
Our decision to choose a token was based on the user's ability to pick what they wanted to do. Some users would prefer an actual hard token. Other users we knew were going to prefer a soft token. To give that user the ability to choose a hardware or software token was essential for us.
w some of the things we liked about Defender for our environment was that the database of users was tied directly into Active Directory, which is nicely replicated between all the domain controllers and didn't need a SQL database for the back-end storage. So it reduced some of our overhead and requirements in terms of servers and network requirements.
The solution will give us the ability to shorten the user password from 16 characters down to about an eight character password, and a six digit token which should make their experience a lot better when accessing the network.
Password Manager will give our users the ability to manage their multiple passwords to the different sites they need to access on a daily basis. We are a 24 by 7 operation. One of the things we really liked about the Password Manager product is that it allowed users to be able to unlock or reset their passwords.
This will give them immediate access to their accounts in those times when they have forgotten their password.
Cloud Access for us is important. We have multiple systems that are sitting out in the cloud that users need to log into on a daily basis. Cloud Access Manager gave us the ability to provide one user name, one password, to all of our services.
By federating Google and authenticating all our requests locally, we no longer had to synchronize passwords to Google so that the user would use the same password to sign into Google as they would to sign into Windows. By implementing two factor authentication on the cloud based solutions, we also secure those solutions in addition to just a user name password.
Working with the One Identity team has been a really great experience for us. We've not only had access to excellent salespeople, but excellent engineers that actually use the product on a daily basis that we've been able to call not only during the sales process, but during implementation as well. The One Identity solution will provide the Village of Westmont a secure working environment for all of our users.
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