One of the primary features we use is the password reset. The challenge we had was that our helpdesk had to manually reset customers in the field and reset their passwords one at a time, so we implemented CA Identity Manager to allow us to automate this self service reset of passwords.
One of the biggest benefits is the reduction of calls to the help desk. We reduced by a third our calls for password resets because users of the system could then reset themselves using the challenge questions and you know, people forget passwords it's an easy function. That was a huge benefit.
We are actually looking at something to make it easier from a user front end. The helpdesk does a lot of work today, so we're looking at another product from CA. I think it's called the Identity Suite.
Make the maintenance and the updates easier. As well as a more intuitive interface.
It's been very solid. We went live a year ago, so almost 18 months and it's been rock solid.
It's been very good. We have above 40,000 users on that platform and we never have any issues.
We haven't had any issues that required us to go to technical support, so it's really been very good.
We were using a product from Oracle - OID. Primarily it was all home grown, we had to build the backend database, we did some interactions, so it was really a custom solution and it wasn't as scalable, and it didn't have the security features. Rather than invest our development effort into creating security components, partnering with somebody made more sense.
Converting from our old system took a little bit of work. We had a lot of old database access accounts that we had to move over, again, 40,000 or 45,000 but once we took care of that it was pretty painless.
We compared a couple of other vendors. Some of the newer ones are cloud-based, we weren't comfortable with that yet.
The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is stability, the quality of their product, price is always a factor; to make sure you can afford it. We looked at what we had, switching to a new product then we compared it with several other vendors. We typically would go through a matrix and say, "Okay, here are all the items that we feel are important," so when we make that decision you can go back and say this is why and how we made it.
Rating: I'd say probably 8/10. Again, we haven't had any issues from a support perspective, once we've implemented it it's been very solid, people love it and we've saved a lot of money and time from the help desk perspective, so it's been a good investment. I'm really hard on numbers, so 9 or 10 is like impossible.
With security, you have to have a culture of security, and protecting the accounts and passwords and access has to be number one, given every time you see a breach in the news, it's because somebody is not taking care of security. It's top of mine.
It's [CA Identity Manager] done exactly what we want it to. We've actually branched out and done some additional federation logs and stuff like that. Because of the success we've also looked at some other products like CA Advanced Authentication from a external consumer standpoint. It's been a good partnership with CA.
