One Identity Safeguard Reviews

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 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 use Safeguard to manage users when the client wants to record all discussions on an LDAP. The solution is deployed on a VMware ESXI because all our clients don't want a physical appliance. We average about 300 to 500 connections to Safeguard.

Safeguard has the ability to record and retrieve in the full-video format.

We have issues using Safeguard to record http/https connection in a video formt. Currently, they don't have a mechanism to record this type of connection.

We've been working with One Identity Safeguard for about eight months. I work as an integrator for solutions like PAM and One Identity. We make alterations and integrate the solution. 

We run One Identity Safeguard on a VM, so we can create as many as we need. 

I had an issue about a week ago because we were migrating from an old VM to a new one. I opened a ticket, and they responded, but I didn't get a solution. 

We set up a VM appliance and configured it then deployed the solution. The typical time for deployment and configuration is about three to five days.

I rate One Identity Safeguard eight out of 10. It's an excellent solution and a perfect fit for our use case.

We use it for controlling the client sessions into our data center.

We deployed it into our company for controlling a client's behavior in our data center. It is very useful to control their connections, such as RDP. 

I requested for an evaluation license, but no one responded to me. 

We can't review or audit HTTP and HTTPS. This functionality should be added so that we can review and audit HTTP and HTTPS.

I have been using this solution for less than one year.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It scales well in our company.

I requested them for an evaluation license, but no one responded to me. They didn't give me an evaluation license.

I have some knowledge of Wallix. It is a competitor of One Identity. They have similar functionalities, but I didn't explore it too much.

It was easy. There were no problems. It is easy to navigate through the web interface.

As compared to other products, it is reasonable, but the training sessions are too expensive.

I haven't used other products, but I would highly recommend One Identity SPS.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

One Identity Safeguard is used by administrators to access their devices. They will log in using identity management in order to secure the administrator's login.

One Identity Safeguard can improve by having more integration with multiple devices.

I have been using One Identity Safeguard for approximately one year.

I have found One Identity Safeguard to be stable.

The scalability of One Identity Safeguard is good, we can add multiple devices.

We have approximately 40 administrates using this solution in my organization.

We plan to increase usage in the future.

I have not contacted support.

The initial installation was simple.

The full deployment took approximately a couple of months. Not because of the One Identity Safeguard, but because of us, we were busy doing other projects in parallel.

We used a third-party vendor for the implementation and we had a good experience with them.

My advice to others is One Identity Safeguard is a must to have because it's part of the cybersecurity framework, such as Nest ISO. We should have an identity management solution to manage the whole identity, such as privileged users.

I rate One Identity Safeguard an eight out of ten.

I have found the most useful feature of One Identity Safeguard to be Privileged Sessions.

When we compare One Identity Safeguard with Cyberark, we know CyberArk has other tools or other features that are more complex and more useful for the customers. For example, I have one customer that wants to elevate the permission that is available in CyberArk. 

Another example is, I have one potential customer that wants to use some feature that is available only in CyberArk. The scenario is one user request a patient, however, that user doesn't have the permissions. In that request, he wants to request more permissions elevation and more rights under the live connection. This can be done in CyberArk and not in One Identity Safeguard.

We need to allow more permissions for the user who requests access for the previous account in a live connection.

CyberArk gives stronger features for safeguarding at this moment.

I have been using One Identity Safeguard for approximately one year.

One Identity Safeguard is a stable solution.

I have found One Identity Safeguard to be scalable.

I have contacted support. I can create tickets for support and in approximately one hour, I have a response from the support. They are very quick.

I have previously used Cyberark.

The initial setup of One Identity Safeguard was simple. In one week we can be ready to fully operate.

My advice to others wanting to implement this solution is to do the implementation slowly and concentrate.

I rate One Identity Safeguard a nine out of ten.

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 primarily use the solution for managing and monitoring privileged users, both internal and external.

Gave much more visibility over who is doing what and more granular control over external support engineers.

The solution's most valuable features are the efficiency and the quality of the recording.

I would like to see an adjustment with more enterprise architecture. Currently for SPS (SafeGuard for Privileged Sessions) there is only a single appliance option (both virtual and physical). It can be scaled using a load balancer to handle huge amount of sessions (although the device is quite efficient), but it also means you will need to purchase multiple boxes. It would be beneficial to have segregated modules as an option and you could buy and implement them separately. For example: trap module (proxy), audit module (search interface), storage module (store and encrypt recordings), etc.

I've been using the solution for over three years with multiple customers and installations.

The stability of the solution is good.

If your current architecture is not designed for this, then it can it may be difficult to expand beyond a certain amount. Our current biggest deployment is for thousands of users.

Technical support is brilliant. They are very helpful.

I was using other solutions in a lab environment for some demos and comparisons, but in real practice, I have not integrated other solutions.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. However, to figure out how to use it, a consultant or an integrator for new users is highly advised.

We're integrators for the solution. We help clients implement it.

Yes, I made some comparison on CyberArk, BeyondTrust, SSH and CA.

We use the on-premises deployment model. We're an integrator company for this solution.

In terms of advice, I'd say new users should involve the integrator architecture team from the beginning.  From a technical perspective, you need to have discussions with the network team from the beginning.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.