One Identity Safeguard Reviews

Our company is regulated by the central bank in our country. There are about 4,000 employees in our organization. 

Our main need was to reduce the operational cost of our department by increasing the window of operations to 24-hour rather than have office unemployment. 

We are now digitizing the access control function through One Identity. Whoever forgets their password can reset it on their own rather than reaching out to the security desk. Whenever we have a new employee, we found that it was taking at least two days to get them a username or access to the system. Now, once they are logged into the organization and are registered on our ERP system, their complete access will be ready within five seconds. They will receive an SMS with their username and password so they can start working. This has increased efficiency and effectiveness of the access control function. It has reduced operational costs as well as providing services 24/7 with a platform that can be used anytime and anywhere for investigation in case we have a requirement. 

We use the physical appliances, as they are more reliable. Around the world, dedicated appliances are more reliable than having a virtual version/copy. We went with the physical appliances because they are dedicated and closed like a black box. However, we haven't reported any misses with the virtual version. 

We use the solution’s Approval Anywhere feature which enables us to add an extra layer of security for critical passwords without adding time-consuming approval processes. In the past, we were having problems when a user went on vacation. There were many recalled cases of password sharing. When we received this type of incidence and started to investigate, we found out the past setup had no solution. For example, if someone with a daily duty went on vacation, they still had to do it within the office. That is why sometimes people tried to justify the sharing of passwords by the importance of their duties. Now, by using this platform, if someone goes on a vacation, out of office, or needs urgent/planned leave, then our setup will select the functions tied to that person and automatically delegate them to the next person. That person can start performing that duty based on their access. No sharing of passwords is required.

The multilanguage functionality does not support the Arabic language, even though this solution is deployed in an Arabic region. However, it matches our criteria and requirements overall.

One Identity is using a third-party to create one-time passwords. Due to our security restrictions, we needed to build our own. When we discussed this with One Identity, "Why they don't provide a technology that can be hosted on our data center and be built by One Identity," they said they are using a third-party. This was their justification, so I think it's based on their strategy and there's no harm using a third party. However, we were having an issue using a third-party.

I have using this solution for about six months. The project started about one year back. We started product introduction through phases. We went full-fledged with One Identity using Cloud Access Manager, Password Manager, and Privileged Access Management along with identity and access management.

We have been trying to stabilize the system until now. We haven't had the chance to revisit the deployment to find out if there are any expansion plans, as we are working to sustain the set up. We want to increase end user awareness and start building the number of reports.

I didn't have a requirement to test the scalability of the solution. We did discuss the scalability with the system integrator at the beginning, and it's on the license level. I don't think we will have an issue once we come to the point of needing to scale.

We have 3,000 end users and 10 administrators.

I haven't had a chance to work the One Identity technical team. We work with the local partner instead.

None of my team has gone for training yet. However, they did have a handover for operation of the solution. It doesn't need that much training as long as you know the basics of access control functions. End users only need to have a tutorial to the portal. This is what we provide: a tutorial for how to use it and the know-how.

We previously were using a manual process. One Identity helped us to automate this process.

We integrated One Identity with our ERP system (Oracle) and also with our security operations center (Splunk). The integration went perfectly. It was an easy connection. We built the connectivity directly through the API. What we found time consuming: the setup and connecting One Identity. E.g., Oracle takes more time than Splunk to connect because Splunk's system is ready to send the security logs to the security operations centers. With Oracle, the integration depends on the business needs and there are a number of different requirements based on those business needs. The enhancement One Identity made is the historical part related to system access control goes through our SOC to this tool.

My team worked on the initial setup. I don't remember any critical escalations related to technicalities during their field deployments. The local system integrator helped us with any deployment challenges. There was zero disruption to privilege users during the deployment, which can be attributed to the work of the project management team. The deployment took about six months using two outsourced resources.

For the consultation services, we went with a well-known, famous system integration company (Exceed Gulf), who is local. They were cooperative, experienced, and professional. They have led many successful deployments in our region. Sometimes, they provide better advice when we are releasing an RFP to the market, e.g., when they got this RFP, they added value by doing a slight amendment to the deployment. This contributed a lot to the success of this project. Their advice comes based on their experience in the deployment for such a solution in our region. I strongly recommend working with Exceed Gulf and the same team that we worked with, as their technical skills were perfect.

We have not yet seen ROI. The benefit that we get from using One Identity is that it reduces operational costs.

We have a yearly license. The cost depends on how much a company wants to invest in technology. In our organization, we believe in modern digitization and automation processes so we found it affordable. One Identity was not that much less than other solutions and it is not a cheap solution. There were number of cheaper solutions. However, it's the most effective, according to our evaluation.

When we started thinking about approaching such a solution, there was an increased need to digitize or have a platform that helped to provided access control functions. There were a number of solutions in the market, like Oracle and Microsoft. One Identity (per our evaluation) was our selected solution. One Identity won when we match these criteria against other solutions in the market:

• Support
• The system integrator
• Strength of the solution
• Complexity of the solution (less complex than other solutions).

Make sure to always get the support. This solution could not be successfully implemented with no support of the HR and procurement system. You will need to mature all of your HR and procurement processes to do the deployment in a secure manner. This is a security solution, not an IT solution. If you want to deploy it as a security requirement, you need to ensure that the HR and procurement processes are correctly in place. You can use it as a technology solution, because not all the technology requires security, but all security requires technology.

We haven't activated the session recordings yet. We have tested it, and while it worked successfully, we didn't apply it fully because of internal technical issues.

All the logs in the system are recorded and sent to our security operations center (SOC) for analysis. In our SOC, we have end user behavior analysis, but do not depend directly on One Identity to provide this. However, I might ask to have a report for the user behavioral analysis going forward.

I can rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

With Safeguard, there are two virtual appliances. There is one that helps you manage passwords and then there is another one that helps you record the sessions. You can configure it to record whatever you do when you make the remote calls.  

We use this solution for a bank. My current project is to onboard all the bank's security assets onto Safeguard. It will be used for admins to have secure access to the server.  

The part of this product that I like the most is the transparent mode. That is the number one advantage of the product. I also like the ease-of-use. That is what Quest is known for. The interface is interactive, relatively easy-to-use.  

I like the fact that we are using a proxy server. Also, I like the fact that it is integrated in such a way that I can connect to my Linux and Unix resources using my AD credentials. They map the AD credentials to Linux accounts. So, when I am connected to my AD accounts, it acts as a sort of proxy to convert it to the Unix account that it is configured for. That is quite useful.  

The only part of the Safeguard solution that I think could be a problem over time is the amount of storage it takes in the sessions. For example, because it records in real-time video it takes a lot of resources. So, it has not been a problem yet, but we are looking at a solution where we allocate the cost of that additional capacity differently. Then there will be enough resources to compensate for whatever the storage needs are. It just takes a large amount of storage for each current session.  

Another thing that I would like to see them improve is that I would like them to make the transparent board a little bit more transparent. The transparent mode is something I use often and it is the best feature of the product but that is also why I see how it can be improved. It might just be a little bit easier to use.  

We are a long-time Quest partner and have only been using the product for the past five months. We just got onboarded to the One Identity product. This is my first project with One Identity.  

One of the things I really like about the One Identity solution is the fact that it can be configured in active-active cluster mode. It is just a little pricey because you have to purchase the additional licensing just to be able to do an active-active configuration.  

But I like it also because it is a virtual appliance. This means I can configure a high-availability cluster anyhow I want. If I have it on a VMware cluster, I can enable high-availability or any virtual cluster solution that makes sure it is highly available. I would do that using VMware storage. This makes it a more stable and flexible solution.  

The fact that I do not have to worry about other incidental things is good. I am not connected to an external database server. So all the dependencies, patching, and additional setup is something I do not have to do on the One Identity appliance. Everything is on a hardware appliance. In other words, I do not really even have to worry about securing my security device. It may not be the first thing to think about, but because you deployed a security device, now you have to worry about securing it. As it is all-in-one as a hardware appliance, I do not have to worry about all that.  

We have not had any issues with scalability to this point and it is handling our capacity and needs. The only potential issue would be budgeting for additional licensing, which would not be a problem in our case, and handling the resource usage. These are not really limiting.  

Between the banking client and our company, not everyone has been onboarded yet to the One Identity Safeguard. But in the end, we are looking at probably about 500 servers and I think a total of about 180 admins. This seems realistic using this product.  

My impression of support is that the guys there are very helpful. They are eager to jump in and to help you out. Yes, I think it is a great service.  

I think that the initial setup was very straight forward. Pretty much a piece of cake, actually. With our implementation strategy, the deployment actually took only about two hours. That is including the discovery of the assets. It is a relatively large enterprise network, so discovery can potentially take some time. This was very reasonable.  

The approximate cost on a yearly basis is in the ballpark of about 80 grand, $80,000. That is for about 100 servers. That is the standard license fee. There are not really any additional costs once you purchase that. Sometimes you can have professional services included with it. For example, if you take a week of professional services or if you need them to do the install. That is the only additional charge.  

As a long-time Quest partner, this was an easy choice to make. Because we were already partners it made sense to work with their other solutions.  

The advice I would give to organizations considering this solution would be that before they make a commitment they need to try to find a local support resource. They will want to be able to get local support because that can be critical. But otherwise, I think it is a good product and a good buy. I would buy it again. As a partner, I would also sell it again because I am confident in it as a product and a solution.  

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the One Identity Safeguard solution as a nine-point-five out of ten. I'm very happy. If I have to choose an integer, it would have to be a nine. Ten would mean it is perfect and there are things I think can be improved.  

We are using the virtual appliance. We are a cloud company working widely with virtualization. We provide virtual machine to our customers. When we deploy a new solution, we try to use our system to show our customers that it works for them. That is why we are using a virtual appliance which validates the usage.

For now, we are using it for traceability of access inside the platform because we are a certified company: ISO 27001, SecNumCloud, HDS... We use this solution to monitor the session of our administrator and also to capitalize on incidents. When you have an incident in the night and our Level 3 people are working on it, they don't have the time to document all they do on the platform. The main goal is to have the service up as fast as possible. We are now recording the session, and the morning after the incident, we can see the session and understand what has been done to resolve the incident.

We are using the latest version of Safeguard.

When we are asked to do an investigation for a server, we have all the information that we need. We never have any problems as all the information is available to us.

The transparent proxy is the most valuable feature. When you are connecting to a server inside the platform, the user doesn't need to change their habit. They just have to make small configurations to their workstation, then it is transparent for them. Our users like the solution because it's transparent. Users doesn't need to have interaction with 3DS OUTSCALE IT or security team to work as usual. It's interesting for the users because they don't have to think, "I have to note all that I've done during the incident to remember it".

We use the solution’s “transparent mode” feature for privileged sessions. It is very easy because it is only a simple configuration for our users. We don't have to modify our network. We install it, configure it, and it works. So, it is super easy. The rollout for our users is seamless.

The "transparent mode" allows for better visibility. With its monitoring, we can do investigations which are good for us and improve our system.

The interface is better now, but it still could be improved a lot. It needs more organization, menus, automatic refresh of information, and Web 2.0.

An official HashiCorp Vault connector would be very helpful inside the platform.

SSH implementation is not 100% compatible with standard SSH (openssh). For example : JumpHost.

As a result, some options require manual tunning, and complicated user-side configs, where it could be much simpler

We have been using it for a long time: six years.

It is very stable. We have never had incidents with it. When we lost a connection with our Active Directory, the system continued to work. When we lost the storage on the virtual appliance, we restarted it, then it was fine. Thus, the product is very stable. 

One or two people are needed for deployment and maintenance. For the deployment, it's done by the security team for now. However, in the near future, it will be managed by the operations team.

We upgrade about every two months the latest version.

We don't use the scalability. When we need a new appliance, we deploy it inside another network. We don't need scalability for now, but if we grow quickly, we will need to think about it.

We have about 50 users inside the company, including the security team, operations team, infrastructure team, and Level 1 support.

We are using 75 percent of the parallel session unless there is an incident, then we can use all the slots.

I used the technical support once. It was good. I had the answer to my question quickly. I have direct access to the pre-sales team and my account manager. So, I called in and my problem was solved.

Yes but we had to quit it because they didn't have what we needed and it was very expensive. 

In the beginning six years ago, we started with a small instance. We used it very simply and learned how to manage it. 

With the newest version that we massively deployed, we had one week to know how to install it and how it works. Now, we know how it works very well.

Install is fairly simple, with basic options.

Configuration requires a little explanation on the way it works but is straightforward too.

We deployed it ourselves.

We have seen ROI in terms of time. It's easier for us to investigate incidents, which is helpful. It has improved our performance with investigations. It used to take a month to write an incident. Now, it takes us a week, cutting the time down by a fourth.

Our licensing costs are on a yearly basis.

We evaluated CyberArk, which was pretty good, but it is very expensive. CyberArk's interface was better. Also, CyberArk's login was not so transparent. We chose One Identity because it has a transparent login in interruption in the network.

When you use Safeguard in production, it provides traceability and protection around your platform.

I would rate the solution as a seven (out of 10) because of the interface.

I have seen the future of analytics, and it's very interesting. I hope to have the time to try and learn something about that.

We are using One Identity Safeguard for our data protection.

We are utilizing the virtual appliance solution because it is slightly more cost-effective and allows us to manage it remotely.

Secure Remote Access feature is being utilized by non-technical users, primarily for multi-factor authentications. We are implementing MFA; however, some users in our branch are not yet connected. Consequently, we are resorting to using a VPN in our access control measures. At times, we have also employed remote branches for auditing and monitoring any potentially suspicious activities. Our endpoint security is consistently updated and ensures encryption for all the internet services we utilize.

It is important that the Secure Remote Access feature does not rely on a VPN. One Identity Safeguard provides us with the ability to manage access to the system network and data from our remote branches through the Secure Remote Access feature, ensuring a secure and confidential connection on the backend.

We have integrated One Identity Safeguard with our DevOps processes to assist in managing the parameters. Prior to the integration, we used to wait for certain automation related to security, either already completed or sometimes people would proceed without reporting. However, after the implementation, it has proven to be highly effective for security testing through automation at various stages, particularly in the pipeline, and for conducting critical analysis. This has significantly improved our understanding. 

There are numerous valuable data protection features, including the content and information that offer us more scalable protection as needed.

We also have access to immediate support for situations that we are unable to handle.

Some of our users find the functionality a bit complex, and it could be made more user-friendly.

The integration of automation, security monitoring, and secure configuration can be enhanced. We can integrate these elements using Ansible or any other necessary tools. This would be advantageous in terms of time and effort saved during implementation, especially when dealing with merged branches. This approach will guarantee that the code is approved, tested, and verified, potentially resulting in substantial time savings.

I have been using One Identity Safeguard for ten years.

Premier Support is valuable because it enables us to receive prompt assistance whenever we encounter any type of issue.

Positive

The time to deploy varies from a few minutes to several hours depending on the scenario.

We integrate security tests into our CI/CD pipeline for privileged users to ensure that these users are not affected.

We also assessed CyberArk, which is a more robust Privileged Access Management solution compared to One Identity Safeguard. However, it comes with a significantly higher cost.

I would rate One Identity Safeguard an eight out of ten.

We conducted training sessions for all employees and managers in our company. The training was tailored to each person's skills in order to streamline the training process and facilitate the deployment procedures.

The first time I used One Identity Safeguard was when I was the manager of the infrastructure of Ayendeh Bank, and we are currently using it now at my present company.

Our main use case is in security reviews for all of the change management and incident management services, and we also use it for the VPN connection for PAM. It allows us to review everything that goes on over the working day.

For example, our third-parties who support all of our services, including network services (e.g. Cisco) and our Linux servers, are eligible to connect via the VPN, and through One Identity Safeguard, they are able to make contact with and use the various services.

Our company works alongside various PSPs (Payment Service Providers),
and our work here is mainly to prepare the software switch for them, and
to handle the SLA for infrastructure maintenance services. Due to the nature of our work, we also use One Identity Safeguard for on-call and direct administrators whether they are in-house or external to our company. It is, in fact, the main tool for managing access for all the services. And because of that, I'm available for these companies 24/7 all year long.

At present, we have around 17 direct users of One Identity who use it on a daily basis, which includes 10 people from my own department.

The first feature I like about One Identity Safeguard is the live contact point for the VPNs. This has been working very well for us, as it's both highly available and reliable.

The second thing I like is the services that let us review all the contacts and take all the passwords from another administrator. These services are very reasonable. For instance, some of the third-parties will leave our company and support, but then fail to relinquish the usernames and passwords. With the security orchestra that One Identity Safeguard provides, this is no longer a problem.

We currently have a problem with the Active Directory integrations on Windows. Some of our users need to be logged with Active Directory, but we are having communication issues between One Identity and Active Directory. It seems that Active Directory is not well-integrated.

Apart from that, when we are using the interactive login, such as when logging in and going inside the site for support, we find that we need to repeat the username and password, sometimes even two or three times.

When it comes to suggestions for new features, I would like to see something along the lines of an automated command prevention system. To elaborate, sometimes we will have users who input unsafe commands, and we would like to prevent those commands from being processed, and to be able to identify those users who sent the commands.

I believe some kind of automation, possibly based on AI, would be appropriate for this, and it would help the administrators and managers to more easily prevent these kinds of incidents. Part of my role is to reduce the number of total incidents, and if we had an automated mechanism to prevent unsafe commands from being entered in the first place, it would help a great deal.

I have been using One Identity Safeguard for about six years.

I can say that it is 100% stable because during the past two years we have not had a single problem with stability.

In our company, the scalability is good enough for us at present. In my department, there are ten direct users, and outside my department there are another seven direct users. Perhaps when we increase our customers, we will scale up further.

At present, because of the sanction department for technology in Iran, we cannot use the direct customer support. Instead, we use third-party support. For example, we have a contact point with a company who has branches in Turkey, and they are taking the tickets for Safeguard. Before that, with Balabit, we got responses in less than 24 hours.

Positive

Before Safeguard, we were using Balabit. However, Balabit has now been acquired by One Identity.

Another solution that was being used by some of the other companies I consulted for was WALLIX Bastion. Using WALLIX was a really different experience. With One Identity, we have no problems with connections or slow communications in the network, but with WALLIX there were many problems to do with the networking. Sometimes the servers would even crash or hang, but none of these issues have been found in Safeguard. By comparison, Safeguard is much better in terms of performance, networking, and server stability.

There were no real problems with the setup. Regarding the ease of installation, if you have a professional team, then it is easy. But, for example, if it's your first time setting it up as a junior administrator, then it can be quite difficult. I would Safeguard a 3.5 out of 5 in terms of how complex the initial setup is.

We used an in-house team for the implementation, because myself and the other companies we work with have a lot of experience in it. Thus, for us, it was no problem to implement.

The license is very expensive for us, partly due to inflation and partly because of the exchange rate between the Dollar and the Iranian Rial. We purchased a perpetual license that we've been using up until now, but I believe that we are not going to update it in the future. Instead, we plan to find another third-party  to support us with the license, in the sense that we would have access to their license as a shared agreement.

I would rate One Identity Safeguard a nine out of ten.

We use it primarily for our IT team, so they can access our production and pre-production environments, to have better accountability. They have to create a ticket, check it out, and then they have to get approval from our approvers group. So there's accountability from beginning to end, and we also record the sessions.

The time frame to get sessions rolling has been cut to a third. From a productivity standpoint that's tremendous.

In addition to that, the ease of use is fantastic because our IT team is able to check out sessions very quickly because it's so intuitive and easy to work with. They're pleased with it and it allows them to do their jobs much faster. That's probably the largest way it has improved things for us.

Finally, because of the intuitiveness and ease of use for end-users it has been really simple to train on. This product has worked flawlessly for us.

There are a lot of features, so it's going to sound funny, but one of the most simplistic features, the Favorites feature, is the one we like the best. You do a full run-through of configuration to check out a server and then you can save that whole configuration as a favorite. So the next time you go in, you click on the favorite that you configured and it automatically takes you to the end so you can check the server out that much faster. It saves a lot of time, resulting in an increase in productivity and a decrease in issues and errors and interface problems. It increases redundancy and gives us a much easier interface to use.

We're using virtual appliances for Safeguard because of the flexibility of virtual appliances. We can snapshot them, we can restore them quickly. There's a lot more flexibility with virtual.

We use the solution’s Approval Anywhere feature, and it allows a group of five individuals to receive notifications on their phones, through Starling, and review a request and approve it with one click.

We also use the solution’s “transparent mode” feature for privileged sessions. We record them and we also review them. That way, if there are problems with any configurations they did, we can go back and review them. Also, for mentoring, teams utilize it to help individuals deploy code better or to make changes to configurations. There are a lot of positives with that feature. It was very easy to start using this feature. The entire platform is very intuitive, very easy to work with, easy to set up. I can't think of anything that we have really had huge issues with. The rollout of "transparent mode" was seamless for our users. We sent out picture instructions on how to do it and offered to get on a call with people to discuss it with us, but nobody had any questions. In terms of the monitoring itself, it doesn't affect things any differently than the previous solution. It's pretty much the same. Obviously, using the tools is easier, but we were monitoring the same type of information as before.

There is room for improvement in the launch module. They built in a launch button but they don't have effective instructions for configuring it to allow it to launch an RDP session. They're working on that, but the button is in the live product. If they were going to install something that wasn't useful, they should have just disabled it and not rolled it out with the product. Because we don't tie it to an RDP session, you actually have to click the download button and then open the RDP session from there, versus just clicking the launch button and it automatically opening RDP.

Before Safeguard we used TPAM, which is one identity's product as well. We upgraded but we've been using the overall product since 2016.

Overall the solution is very stable. We have not had any major issues on it. It's a nice system.

The only issue I have run into was with our failover two our redundant. There was a pointer to the One Identity platform, it's called an SPP, and it wasn't pointing correctly. But we were able to resolve it. There have really been no issues besides that. Otherwise, everything is very seamless when doing failover and full redundancy.

We can continue to add more VMs to support thresholds. We can certainly scale up with it. It's being used on about 300 servers right now and we have plans to expand to about 200 more.

We have 50-plus people using safeguard right now and they're all in IT. For deployment and maintenance we have one to two people.

We haven't had to use technical support. It's been a solid platform so far.

Previous to this, we were using TPAM and, while it worked, it was horrible to work with. When we saw and got a demo of Safeguard and saw that we would be able to approve things from our phones, saw the user interface which was so much nicer — more intuitive, a lot easier to configure — we went from our teams complaining about the old product every day to not hearing one complaint at all. As a matter of fact, I hear compliments about how much they love Safeguard.

The feedback I have had from users has been a lot of compliments about how much they enjoy working in the interface. It's so much easier to use. It's quick. They can get to the point of checking out a server and of being compliant with security requirements, while at the same time being able to troubleshoot an issue much faster than they used to be able to.

The initial setup was a little complex.

We worked with an integrator, Rallypoint Solutions, to accomplish it because we hadn't accomplished it before with Safeguard specifically. The integrator was tremendous. I have nothing but good things to say about Rallypoint. They helped integrate the whole thing. They really had a great understanding of it. We worked with them throughout the entire setup. We were the hands and they were guiding us. Overall, it was very easy to get up and running.

It did take about a week, eight hours a day — so 40 hours — to get fully up and running and everything imported from the old system into the new one, and to make sure all testing and redundancy were done.

The deployment was not disruptive to our privileged users at all. We ran both the old system and the new system in parallel and allowed them to migrate over after a period of two weeks. However, we had most people on it the first week and they loved it. They were eager to get off the old system.

It required no training. I provided step-by-step picture instructions that we had written out and that was it. They were good to go. We did have a strategy in place, if we needed to work with our teams from a training standpoint. We had sessions set up and ready to go where a live person could walk them through it. But none of our IT users seemed to need that. It was very intuitive.

We have seen ROI using Safeguard. For example, configuring a session in the old version used to take them 10 or 15 minutes, or more. Not only that, but the live person who was the approver had to be logged into the system. So the requester could actually wait a couple of hours before somebody would be able to log in and approve the session. With Safeguard, it's approved within less than a minute because approvers get the notifications on their phones and are able to review the tickets effectively. They understand what's being accomplished and know that it has a ticket number with more detailed information that they can verify, and they can approve the session right there. The individual gets that approval immediately. We went from an average of from anywhere between 15 minutes and two hours down to less than a minute or two. That's tremendous.

They offer a fair price for a robust solution.

In addition to the standard licensing fees there are costs for Starling, but they're very minimal annually. You need Starling to use the mobile Approval Anywhere feature that is so convenient. So it's worth every dime. That extra cost is so small that it's not really even noticeable.

There are integration costs if you aren't looking to do it yourself. I highly recommend their integrators. They are a little expensive but certainly worth the money.

We did evaluate other solutions, but this is the best choice. We went with Safeguard because of the flexibility, the interface, and a more seamless migration from the old system to the new system. And costs were a consideration, obviously.

If you're looking for something that is easy to use with a very intuitive interface — even the administrator interface is very intuitive — I would highly recommend Safeguard. The entire platform is very intuitive, very easy to work with, easy to set up. I can't think of anything that we have really had huge issues with.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Safeguard is to make sure you have enough accounts available for individuals' sessions so that they can check out. The way Safeguard works, an account is created just for Safeguard. Individuals go in as themselves and then they have to check out this account in order for that account to be able to remote to the server. That account would be the only one allowed to remote to the server. But if multiple people have the account checked out for multiple hours, that presents an issue. So keep your session times as minimal as possible. Even for timeout, allow them to change it if they think they're going to use it longer. But the important thing is to make sure that you either have enough accounts or have your session timeouts limited.

We do use the solution's behavior analytics feature, but I wouldn't say that it's too useful at this point for us because we know what their usage is because it has to be done through tickets. For how long they're using it, what kind of configurations they're doing, and what they're doing, the analytics piece of it is more expected for us, as a result. It does help us to identify risky actions without having to create a set of rules or policies, and without any effort on our part. But in our environment, if users don't put in a ticket and provide effective comments, then our approvals group doesn't approve it. There's no automatic approval set up. An individual reviews every request, so malicious use would not be possible.

The three main use cases that we have are:

1. Ensure our human and non-human privilege accounts are locked up in a password vault. 
2. Have workflows to handle the major types of usage, such as break glass and business as usual. 
3. Changes in usage of the credentials are tied into approved change requests. 

These drive our first goal to take all our privileged users on the help desk, our local accounts on our desktops, our servers (web servers, app servers, or database servers), and individuals in our network group who do our firewalls, then migrate all these human accounts into Safeguard Password Vault. Last Fall, we went group by group and revised their accounts. We took away any type of privilege account that they had, ensuring that all of these accounts were then migrated to the Vault. They could then check out passwords to facilitate any type of privilege activities they needed to do on behalf of the bank.

We use virtual appliances for this solution, which made sense for us, especially if we will plan to perhaps migrate to the cloud. Right now, it's all virtualized on-premise.

Anytime new tools and technologies are being brought into the bank, the biggest impact is to the process, procedures, and culture. There is a culture change when any new technology gets rolled out. This solution changes the way we have done the business for many years. We're taking a very controlled, conservative approach in how we roll the technology out.

It is working as it's supposed to work. We had a lot of good support from the One Identity team who helped us build it and do a test. 

We are able to log and get reporting on all privileged activity that is being performed. We like the fact that we can leverage the session recording feature, which is especially valuable when we're dealing with third-party vendors that have to remote into our our boxes and servers to do any work on behalf of the bank. Now, we can record everything they are doing to ensure that they're only doing the changes that were needed. In addition, we use it to leverage knowledge transfer with our internal staff.

We use the solution’s Approval Anywhere feature. We do have the Starling 2FA app on our mobile devices. We haven't rolled out the request and approval yet. We want to get people to use it in their daily functions, whether it's business as usual work, break glass, or any changes that they need to make tied into an approved formal change request. Starting in April, we will be rolling out the request and approval phase. Based on the type of change being requested, break glass will need to be approved, especially if they're doing it during the daytime or off-hours. Then, we will have change requests tied into our change-advisory board. Once there's a change that's approved via our CAB process, then that person will be allowed to check out the credentials they need and tie it back into the ServiceNow ticket that was created. This gives us the audibility between when that change was being made and ensuring that it's being performed for its intended purposes. We are taking a crawl-walk-run approach.

Some of the out-of-the-box reporting isn't that rich. We spoke to our Safeguard reps who have acknowledged that some of the reporting features can certainly be improved and that we're not the only customer who has cited this. There are very little out-of-the-box reporting capabilities. You have to build the queries and the report. I believe in the next release they're going to be addressing this.

We have been using Safeguard in a production capacity for about nine months now.

We haven't had any problems at all. 

There was one issue where we had to put a certain fix on and were able to work with the One Identity people. We downloaded the fix and put it onto our dev environment. After it was baked into our dev environment for a day or so, we then scheduled that change to go live into our production environment. That went very smoothly.

Two people are needed for deployment and maintenance. They're both in the cybersecurity area. There's a manager along with a senior cyber security analyst who runs the platform.

The tool does everything that it is designed to do. It is one of the leading privileged access management products out on the market. They rebuilt the whole product, giving it a nice brand a new clean user interface, which is very user-friendly and easy to use. One Identity has done a very good job taking the old product, TPAM, and doing a whole refresh of that tool. We're very happy with the Safeguard product.

We have approximately 50 to 60 human privilege accounts whose roles are everything, everywhere. From the information security department to the desktop people, there are about 12 users in that area. There are about 20 people who comprise our IT engineering group and another 15 or so who comprise our network team. Then, there are the third-party users who have to login on behalf of the bank to do changes for us, which is another 10 or so privileged accounts which have been setup for a one-time usage when a third-party vendor needs to remote into our system. Crawl-walk-run impacts about 30 percent of all the changes being made. Most changes are made to the production environment and need to be done with a privilege account.

I would rate the technical support as very good and strong. We're happy with the support we get from our One Identity team. We see it as something that will be accepted more as the culture changes at the bank. We did the human accounts first because with the non-human service accounts there have been challenges this year. You have to tread water very slowly since you have to do a good analysis and understand what these non-human service accounts are used for. It's not just a simple lock them up in a vault type of scenario. It will take us a bit more time to put a plan together beginning in the second quarter to address the onboarding of these non-human service accounts into the password vault.

There wasn't much training required for those who manage the product. It was pretty straightforward. We did do training though. We had a training manual as well as a hour training class with various user groups. Our hour training, manual, and how-to guide along with being able to support issues/concerns via our cybersecurity team was beneficial to the success of the implementation.

We did not use another solution previously.

Prior to this Safeguard implementation, we did not know when somebody was using their elevated privileges to do certain features or functions. We only hoped that it was according to whomever the change request was associated. Now that we're able to audit log and record what is being done, we can play back all the sessions to make sure no type of unattended usage of the privilege or elevated credentials were being used. From securing the bank standpoint, it has helped tremendously.

The team shared with us that the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The deployment took no more time from when we got the servers brought in to when got the software installed. This took a few weeks to get it up, configured, and customized for our needs. Then, there was some sandbox testing which was done, then we started the pilots within the first three months of having the solution stood up.

Anytime you are putting in a deployment change that affects privilege users, it's going to create some problems. That's why we took a very slow approach of taking one user from all of our various groups. We had one person from each of our teams: desktop, network, and IT engineering. We worked with them for about a month. We tried to shake out any bugs and issues that they would have before we gradually rolled it out to others. 

People are very adverse to change. When you have this type of a solution, the technical capabilities of the product along with all the process change creates some issues. However, we expected that.

My role was as head of identity and access management to work in concert with our cybersecurity manager. It is his team who owned and rolled out the technology to the bank. My responsibility was making sure from an identity and access management process that the procedures had been in place and they satisfied our internal and external audit requirements. I'm more of the process guy, not the technician.

Being in information security, anytime you can sit down with the board of directors, and say "We now have a more secure bank," there is ROI. The reason: The biggest threat to any bank is an insider threat. Now, with our privileged access, we have them logged, recorded, and locked up in a password vault so we know who's making changes, when they're making change, and why they're making changes. This helps greatly improve the security posture of the bank. That's what we use to sell and justify that it was a good investment for the bank.

In addition to Safeguard, we looked at a product by the name of CyberArk and one by the name of BeyondTrust. These were the three products that we brought in for a proof of concept. In the summer of 2018, we made the decision to go with Safeguard. Then, between June and July 2019, we had it up and running, starting pilots and rolling it out accordingly.

When we did our scoring criteria on the three products, all the products were very close. What it came down to was price. We had individuals on the cyber team who had previous experience with the One Identity Privileged Access Management product at that time, which was called TPAM back then. Those individuals had a very good relationship and understanding of that tool. This weighed into our decision as well as cost to go with the One Identity Safeguard solution. It was definitely cheaper than the other two products that we evaluated.

The solution is part of our identity and access management product. We use Saviynt as our identity, governance and administrative tool. We certify all privilege accounts on a schedule basis. There is some integration with our identity and access management platform/program at the bank. It allows us to be in a position where we can identify and detect as well as prevent any type of privilege act that's being used as a threat at the bank. The integration was easy. It didn't pose any problems.

We have had a mixed bag regarding the solution’s usability and functionality. We have had some people who said that the tools worked nicely. They checked out their credentials every morning, use them for the better part of the day. We set the duration for eight hours. Once somebody checks out something in the morning, they pretty much use that password for the entire day. For some groups, this created a problem because of the type of work that they do, such as long running processes. We've had some issues where their password expired while a process was still running. We had to work with our IT engineering group to come up with a different type of the duration for their needs. One Identity has been very good at working with us to help us through these use cases. 

Understand each use case very carefully and thoroughly. This changes the way someone conducts their business. We had to be cognizant of the impact to our day-to-day operations. If I could do it all over again, I would spend more time understanding the impact of a security tool, such as a privileged access management solution. I think we could have done somethings better than we did.

We haven't started to use the solution’s behavior analytics feature, but as we start building up some data, then that puts us in a position to be able to identify any type of exception or anomalous behavior. We haven't built up enough trending data to leverage that functionality at this time.

We are very happy with the tool. I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

We have more than 1,000 servers or application servers, and we have several layers of teams. We have super admins, system admins, and operations staff, and we also have application vendors using the system. In such a large environment, it was really difficult for us to do identity management on a daily basis. We had new people joining the team, and we also had people leaving. We had to put in additional manpower to monitor these activities and comply with the regulations. That was the main reason we moved to automation with the One Identity solution. We are using their Privileged Account Management solution.

We have virtual appliances. We don't have physical ones.

We have several data centers located all over the globe. Previously, if someone needed access or certain permissions, we had to manually go to our Active Directory, identify the user, and give permission. We had to do that one by one. When we had hundreds of new joiners, it was a time-consuming activity. Sometimes, this activity would take more than two days. One Identity has made all this easier. Monitoring has become much easier, and I can invest the energy in other things instead of monitoring which user is doing what. It has become a one-console management for us.

For my team, it has reduced the task of monitoring who did what and using which ID by 80%. They only have to do 20% of the work than before.

We are using all of the access features. It is much easier for a new user to adopt this solution. It also works perfectly fine with a VPN.

All the features are promising, but we love the reporting feature because we can get each and every report. That's a major compliance requirement. Its reporting is really amazing, and it has made life a lot easier.

Its setup is quick. It is easy to set up and operate. It doesn't matter whether you have a deep IT background or not.

Cost-wise, it is a little bit expensive, which makes it difficult to get management approval. Its price should be reduced.

In terms of features, I'm completely satisfied with it. I am not expecting any more features. Its cost is the only issue. Everything else is okay.

We introduced this product in our organization in 2014.

It is pretty stable.

It is very scalable. We recently increased the number of licenses. Previously, we had a thousand servers, but now, the number has increased. The number of users has also increased. So, we upgraded our system. 

We are using it mostly for privileged users, developers, and system administrators. In total, we have around 300 users. We have plans to increase its usage. We have some upcoming projects where we want to use it on a larger basis. We have plans to use it for DevOps users and third-party vendors, but it will take a little bit of time.

We have not integrated the solution with any other parts of the business, such as DevOps, RPA, or cloud targets. We are evolving day by day. We are upgrading our technology, and we have plans to do that in the future.

We had premium support initially, but we don't require that now. We didn't encounter any critical issues. We are using their regular support. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We were not using another solution previously. Privilege management was a really tough task before the One Identity solution.

It was straightforward. Of course, when you are introducing a new product, you need to do a little bit of research, but the steps were very simple. You don't need much technical knowledge, and you don't need to go so deep to do the configuration. You can just have a look at the setup start guide. Anyone should be able to do it easily.

Our deployment took around six months because we did a few PoC. We also tested it in different system environments before bringing it to the production environment. Out of these six months, we spent almost two months doing the PoC with other products, and then for two months, we put it in the UAT environment or the test environment, and then we brought it into the production environment. So, overall, it took six months for the rollout.

The deployment wasn't disruptive for our privileged users because they were working with the old method while we were implementing it. So, there was no pause during the implementation. Once we completely rolled out One Identity, they started using it.

To start using the solution, you at least need knowledge of the policies and configurations available. You require a little bit of training because one change is going to impact thousands of users.

When we did the deployment, we had a team of about 30 people. Now, we don't have a dedicated team for its maintenance. We have a team of about 15 people doing other activities and managing various technologies, including One Identity.

I have definitely seen an ROI. It is not necessarily in terms of cost. My work has reduced, and I'm able to focus the saved energy or time working on other technologies or implementing new things in other areas of my organization.

Its subscription cost is too much, and sometimes, it is very difficult to pitch the solution to the management for cost approval. If the cost is reduced a little bit, it would be easier. If its cost was less, many other organizations that currently cannot afford it would be able to use this technology. I'm sure many organizations around the globe are having issues with identity management, and it is a very difficult task for IT to manage privileged accounts.

We did PoC to identify different solutions. We tried several solutions, but it didn't work out. We did a PoC with the One Identity solution, and it was easy to manage because it helped us to meet all the compliance requirements and do other things. That's why we went with this solution.

I would recommend it if you are looking for a privilege management or identity management solution. If you are having challenges with reporting and compliance, it will certainly be helpful because you will get a lot of details for auditing and monitoring purposes.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is an amazing product, but its cost needs improvement.