Desktop SSO and App Provisioning Transform User Experience for Investment Researcher Redburn Partners

With close to 200 staff in Europe and the US, investment broker Redburn Partners publishes highly regarded research on a number of sectors for its clients, which span aerospace, auto, banks, chemicals, tobacco, and luxury goods.

Challenges
As part of a broader Digital Transformation project, Redburn selected a leading cloud storage app for secure cloud document storage. They quickly looked to ease users’ transition to the new system, and set up single sign-on (SSO) to simplify password and identity and access management (IAM).

The cloud storage app vendor recommended OneLogin and Okta—after some research, Redburn chose OneLogin, as it appeared cleaner and more straightforward to implement the service, as well as connect applications. Initially, they just wanted to sync passwords across the app and their corporate directory environment. “The storage app vendor provides their own directory connector service, which provisions users, but then OneLogin handled the single sign-on side of it as well, and we thought if we could implement that, that would be quite good,” says Seni Williams, IT Support Analyst at Redburn Partners.

Solution
Continues Williams, “Users sign in, and OneLogin takes them straight through to the application page, without the need to pop in their credentials over and over again. We saw it was capable of a lot more, so we implemented desktop SSO, brought in a couple more apps and upgraded to enterprise.” Redburn recently changed its OneLogin environment from a single to a dual directory connector with failover, high-availability setup and redundancy. “So it makes sense now to move as many of our applications as possible into OneLogin, making them highly available,” says Williams.

“As soon as we create a user in one of our corporate directories, it automatically provisions them in all the applications required. So we go through a new user checklist, create the user and their mailbox. Once those two stages are done, the users automatically get ingested into all the applications. And they can start using those apps straight away. We try to simplify it as much as possible,” explains Williams.

Continues Williams, “With desktop SSO, it’s so efficient not having to redirect to the OneLogin page when you’re in the office. It authenticates straight in. OneLogin app provisioning is working really well—it’s a lot quicker than I expected. I thought it might take 10-15 minutes from performing an action in a corporate directory to it triggering the change in OneLogin, but it happens in just a few seconds. It’s really good!”

Results
“From a security perspective, password synchronization definitely gives us a lot more control. If a user leaves the company, we don’t have to go into every app and change their password or lock down their account. Just by disabling the user’s Redburn account, we know that then blocks access to all the apps in OneLogin, which is really valuable,” says Williams.

Redburn’s experience with both the product and support have been quite positive. “Users are very big fans of only needing to remember one password. Company feedback on the product has been very good, both from IT and our users. We’ve been using OneLogin two years, and we’ve had no issues with it whatsoever. The support team is really top notch. Every time I’ve had to contact your support team, they’ve been really helpful, very quick response, and have resolved the issues within a few hours of contacting them,” says Williams.

Mapping and Provisioning Savings
“I was quite impressed with the mappings feature, because it saves a lot in terms of user administration. So you can map individuals to particular roles or groups. Then if you add a user to a group in the corporate directory, it sets off automatically provisioning certain applications. So the mapping feature with provisioning is quite useful,” says Williams.

“In summary, OneLogin has helped us bring together a lot of our applications. We focus on how simple it is to set up, and how easy it makes life for our users as well in terms of interfacing those applications. Because, in a lot of companies change isn’t always readily accepted. By making that move as simple as possible, OneLogin has made life a lot easier.”

Why OneLogin?
OneLogin brings speed and integrity to the modern enterprise with an award-winning single sign-on and identity management platform. Our portfolio of solutions secure connections across all users, all devices and every application, helping enterprises drive new levels of business integrity and operational velocity across their entire app portfolios.