One Identity Safeguard Reviews

I work for a bank, and we use Safeguard to manage access to our Internet banking services. We use Safeguard for two things: identity and access management and detection recording. We have our services onboarded on SysTrack doing RDP directly to the servers or station, and we use virtual appliances for collection. The solution covers around 150 users at this organization. 

I like Safeguard's snapshot feature that enables us to review the last time an application was opened and by whom. If there are any issues, we can look behind the scenes to see what has been done. We can suspend a user's access or close off a server. 

We've had issues managing accounts and access to some data saved on the servers. Accounts are granted a new working certificate daily. We have an account to do it on APIs online and sync it with that. If the path changes at some point or someone changes the password, I don't know if it's from the Active Directory or what. 

I have used Safeguard for one year.

Safeguard is stable. 

It's scalable, depending on the solution case. I don't know if it's domain-based because it was not restricted. We're gradually moving to the Azure cloud.

One Identity support is okay. 

Deploying Safeguard was straightforward.

I rate One Identity Safeguard eight out of 10.

The primary use case for our customers is to monitor and audit external vendors, as well as keep track of internal actions when privileged user accounts are being used to access systems internally.

For our customers, it's much easier for them to be in line with audits. A lot of our customers work in the medical field, where it is important for them to keep track of external vendors, e.g., maintaining medical appliances inside of a hospital. This solution gives them real confidence that they can keep their customers safe and their data protected.

There are a variety of protocols that it supports.

The video-like stream and audit capabilities, in combination with its indexing capabilities to search for critical events quickly, are valuable features.

The transparent mode for privileged sessions is really nice because it keeps the integration quite smooth. Also, users don't have to change the way that they currently are used to working. 

It is easy to manage. There is a very logical, clear user interface. Also, the integration of scripts is thoughtfully implemented. Overall, it's a nice product to manage.

There are some features which are still missing compared to other competitors. For example, some customers need legacy VPN authentication capabilities.

The automated change of the passwords, which is now integrated, could be improved to be more flexible regarding different systems.

The overall stability has improved quite a bit throughout the years. The appliances run well, both virtual and physical. The product is pretty good, especially compared to other vendors and products.

Because of the nature of the connections being monitored, you can load balance it quite well. It is easy to shift the load from one appliance to another. However, the high availability function of the box itself requires a long time to switch over from one appliance to another. So, there is room for improvement

The technical support is tremendous. For large projects, we have had some challenges, but we were never left alone by the vendor. Also, in one case for a small customer, One Identity assigned one engineer to help with assessing the AD infrastructure of our customers, which was really helpful.

The install and deployment are quite rapid. For a smaller project, sometimes it only takes us about two to three days to implement and get the policies inline. For larger projects, it's actually also not that long for the appliance itself. The product requires a lot of changes on the management side, how vendors work, and how you need to counsel people how to use it, especially in Germany. Then, they are monitored, which is the quite larger portion of it.

For our implementations in Germany, we implement an explicit model most of the time. Therefore, the transparent mode for privileged sessions has not been used that much in my projects.

Look at the entire portfolio, since it has changed so rapidly. The capabilities have improved quite a bit. You need to make sure not to miss out on any features.

The Approval Anywhere for Privileged Passwords is a really good concept, because it enables admins to do other work, be more flexible, and work from home. However, we don't have any real experience with it yet, as we are looking into it at the moment.

We primarily use One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS) for managing our customers' access to their critical systems.

We are able to demonstrate what has happened on the systems and who did what, when we have to investigate, in regards to audits using evidence.

• Acting as a proxy
• Session encryption
• Flexibility of usage

The transparent mode for privileged sessions is one of the best things for customers, because they don't see the system in-between. Thus, it is transparent for them.

The system is easy to manage, as it is not a system that you will change everything all of a sudden. It evolves most of the time with customer requests.

• We have not yet found the solution to be extensible through cloud-delivered services.
• Our external indexers are able to integrate with a hardware security module (HSM), which is good. What we have now requested is the integration of HSM with the SPS solution to be able to not have to manage certificates and the private key outside of any tamperproof system.
• We would like to be able to generate certificate signing requests (CSRs) from the interface for certificates. 
• We would like to be able to manage the lifecycle of the archived audit traits. If they are on the box, the cleanup and archiving policies are applied, as soon as they are archived on the external share, this does not apply. We need our customers to not have to manually delete these archives.
  
• From a web interface perspective, we would like to be able to duplicate connections, so we can reorder them.

We have not had a major issues regarding stability once we migrated our users onto the virtual solution. However, for some users, the physical appliance has been a bit buggy.

As of now, we use mainly virtual and have not tested the scalability and high availability, because it is a new thing.

The technical support is good. There has been great improvement to all the knowledge base articles available. Therefore, we are able to find a lot of solutions already when we create support requests.

It takes us a long time to make the people from product management and development to understand our needs, e.g., integrating this product with HSM.

Because we are a service provider, we have to demonstrate that our systems are really tamperproof. We had that experience previously, and now again, with One Identity SPS, as the product fits our needs.

The initial setup is quite simple, not complex. The installation documentation is good, so the installation is okay. You just need to read the documentation, understand how it works, and how it has to be integrated. Once you do your homework, it's quite easy.

We are the integrator for the deployment.

To install and deploy the solution for the customers, we count one day for a workshop with all the people involved: network, business users, IT, support, etc. Then, for the implementation, it can take another one to five days.

It is the life of our customers because it brings a lot of security. So, the return on investment is really on all aspects of compliance, security, and audit.

We implement this solution upon customer request.

Test it and its competitors. You will probably choose SPS.

Both the search functionality and speed have been greatly improved.

We are not using privileged passwords.

We use this solution to separate the office environment from the production environment with a secure network zone. All user sessions go through One Identity Safeguard before they can reach the production environment. All sessions are audited and they are indexed/searchable through the GUI. Some of the data are transferred to our SIEM solution. For the moment we use the product for RDP and SSH sessions. We are going to use it for Citrix farms also in transparent mode. 

All user sessions are going through Safeguard. They are all audited and secured with forcing the minimum security settings on the side of the user. With this setup, you can easily secure all of the connections to the production environment from the office. Especially if you have a lot of different places connecting to the production environment, it is a PCI DSS requirement that you secure the flow. In our company we already audited the product as part of the PCI DSS certification.

The most valuable feature is auditing the sessions. All of the sessions (RDP, SSH, Citrix) can be audited and replayed on demand.

Complete indexing on SSH sessions means that all commands are searchable after indexing.

Management of the farm of appliances. When you have more than one server to handle the traffic, you need to configure everything on each console and maintain seperately. The cluster feature is coming in the next versions, until then you can handle with some scripts but its not straight forward. In case you want to use a farm of appliances instead of one you should consider this.

Monitoring of the platform should be easier and more functional so that you can have a clear picture of the running service. Again when you have a farm of appliances you need to have all the monitoring data centrally so you know what is happening with the overall service. This feature is missing. You have to go on each server to see what is the status there.

We have been using this solution for two years.

This is an extremely stable product. Outages depend only on your environment. The service can run smoothly forever, depending on your company's setup and possible maintenance outages.

No problem to scale. It's always a good option to use a load balancer in front of the solution to handle the traffic.

Our experience with technical support has been extremely good. 

This was the first implementation of such a product in the company.

Setup is straightforward as long as you plan correctly.

The initial setup was with the vendor. They have extremely good knowledge of the product and provide good support.

This solution provides PCI-DSS compliance, so ROI can be considered very good.

The full license is expensive but if you plan to use it in a big organization then it is the best option because it is more flexible.

More options where evaluated, like Centrify and CyberArk, before we choose this solution.

Before you decide, do a full analysis of your requirements and see if the product fulfills them. Performing such an analysis after the fact is going to be difficult.

We use the on-demand version. We use the solution for monitoring and connection to the customer's server for Windows and Linux.

It's easier to connect to the server and it makes it more secure. We've seen about a 40% improvement in that regard.

The monitoring system is very good.

It has a very nice user interface.

The product is very fast to implement.

We use the solution's transparent mode for privileged sessions.

There is a lack of documentation and many problems with the plugins.

I did run into problems with transparent mode for privileged sessions. We didn't connect correctly to the server. It was an issue we had with the customer's server, not the product itself.

The security of the connection could be improved. 

I've been using the solution for one year. 

It's not completely stable. Sometimes the newest version does not support an older version.

The solution is not so scalable. 

Mabe 20 or so users are leveraging it in our organization. They are admins. 

We use regular support. The response times are too long. Sometimes it could take days. 

Positive

I previously used CyberArk. I changed companies, and now I work with this product. I find Safeguard to be easier to implement, however, it does lack documentation.

It is fast to implement. 

While the process is not technically complex, there was a lack of documentation and we had to figure out how to do it ourselves. The deployment took three weeks. We had two people working on the process.

We have yet to witness an ROI.

The solution is offered at a good price. We pay a monthly fee. I'm not sure of the exact cost we pay.

I'm a product partner. 

We are using the latest version of the solution. 

I have yet to use the cloud assistant feature, so I can't say much about that aspect of the solution. We also do not use the solution's secure remote access feature for privileged users. We don't have it integrated with DevOps or RPA.

While basic knowledge is important, there isn't much training required to start using the solution. 

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to manage passwords and use for the RDP access. 

Our infrastructure is three SPPs and two SPSs. This is across 1,000 users and approximately 500 targets. 

Safeguard can define and update processes and procedures into the security framework of a company, including mobile. It allows us to change the policies and configurations on a mass scale in regards to security.

The most interesting thing about this product is it is very easy to implement and configure as well as its usability. Also, for the final user, the work experience doesn't change when using the SPS for the Linux administrator, which is fantastic. You change only a little bit of the connection. Everything else is really easy.

I just received a question from a customer in regards to a connection with Oracle OID. I tried to integrate Safeguard with the Oracle YAML as well as something else to manage the groups and users from a different system, like AD or LDAP. This one feature could be better. At this moment, the platform system can only use the integration with LDAP or AD. The software for research and development to create a connector to a YAML platform can be very complicated.

I started using it two years ago.

It is a very stable system. There are no problems when using the platform.

The scalability is fantastic. It is very easy to connect and use the solution, if you need it.

There are two different supports: one for SPS and another for SPP. The technical preparation of the support is very high. They have very quickly given me the solution for a couple of issues that I have seen.

We switched from CyberArk to Safeguard. In order to manage CyberArk, it is a very big effort. The platform is very complex. The management system of Safeguard is very easy. Also, the configuration for the targeted user is easier in Safeguard rather than CyberArk. Lastly, the cost of CyberArk's licensing is very expensive.

We try to understand what the customer needs in order to fit the solution for what they want, then we plan all the activities based on that.

We can deploy the system in a couple of days, then the system is up and running. The next step is importing the whole system. The time frame of this depends on many targets the customer has, but it doesn't take too long.

I work at a system integrator, designing and implementing the solution for our customers. I think our customers see a return of the investment using this solution.

Safeguard is cheaper than CyberArk.

It is a good solution. There is no limit to its usage in a company, e.g., IT or financial.

Check the basic rules in the documentation because the solution is easy to use.

I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10.

We use Safeguard for privileged sessions. It's primarily used as a solution for accessing our production environments.

We were able to take an environment where we had several hosts managed by different people and consolidate that into a single, centrally managed solution.

The extensible framework for authentication is one of the most valuable features. We use an MFA plug-in and a lot of different factors, depending on what the business use-cases are. And of course, the auditing functionality is also valuable.

We have also found the solution to be extensible through cloud-delivered services. It's worked out well. The SPS instances we use are located on-premise, but we can still utilize them to access resources in the cloud. That's not a problem. We haven't deployed any SPS itself in the cloud, but it works fine for our cloud environments.

Feature-wise, right now, it has most of the features that we're looking for. It could improve a bit on the management side of things. One example would be when doing an upgrade. We have a highly-available appliance spare, and even though we have two nodes, there's no way to do an upgrade without taking everything completely offline. It would be nice if they could improve that.

The product has generally been stable. We have had some issues, mainly due to the types of traffic. Our end-users are doing different things through SSH tunnels that were not expected on the appliance. We've been working with support to resolve that.

The product is scalable.

Tech support has been great. They've been responsive and knowledgeable, so we've been happy with them.

It took us about three or four weeks for the initial setup and deploy. Part of that was developing a plug-in for the multi-factor authentication. We were able to do it in a way that wasn't disruptive, with our current infrastructure. At their discretion, the end-users were allowed to move over, one-by-one. After we deployed it, it took about two months for all of the users to actually migrate over to using it.

• Fully transparent for users.
• Supports many protocols.
• Full OCR indexing: You can find anything that happened in sessions, including commands, programs opened, etc. Without OCR, you would only be able to find who did which sessions, but not the content of the sessions or what admins have been doing.
• Non-agent approach: A very important feature that is able to monitor access to devices which are not computers, such as switches, firewalls, or any device which uses SSH, TELNET, HTTPS. You are able to monitor access to the Internet by web browser, because SCB can work as a HTTP/S proxy.

Our customers use it to provide full privileged-access monitoring for external users/administrators, so they are fully compliant and still have easy access to external user’s activity.

VMware PCoIP protocol support: Many customers are switching from normal computers/environment to VDI infrastructure and some of them are switching to VMware Horizon that uses PCoIP protocol, which is not supported right now.

Central management for more SCB boxes: If you have many boxes in a customer infrastructure (right now we have one customer of this kind in POC and they will need eight boxes) with the same configuration/purpose, you have to do everything 8x. I know this feature is on the roadmap, but nobody knows when it will be available.

I’ve been using Balabit for six years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

I give technical support a 4.5/5.

We did not use any previous solutions.

It was super easy to deploy, not complicated, and did not have the hidden Capex that competitors do!

It’s an easy license model; you can choose virtual or hardware appliances.

We evaluated ObserveIT and CyberArk.

Try more functions and use them! It’s a very powerful product; much more complex than all other competitors. But, almost all companies use it on less than 30% of their infrastructure.