Safeguard by One Identity Reviews

We started with administrative use cases and we were able to take control of all the local administrator accounts for endpoints and servers. We then started controlling privileged accounts for our domain administrators as well as for any kind of privileged account that had access to our switches, routers, and the like. 

This year we're looking at taking control of all of the servers and application accounts. But that's going to be a longer journey for us because there are a lot more of those accounts, and there is a lot more testing that needs to be done because of the nature of the accounts.

Another use case this year is integrating Safeguard into the SQL database, so we can start taking control of the SA accounts within SQL. 

Furthermore, we have a use case where we are using Safeguard to manage the account for our IIGA solution, which is our identity governance solution. When it creates new users or transfers or terminates users, it's using a privileged account that is being handled by Safeguard.

We have a lot more use cases but these are enough to give you an idea of how we use it.

We went from a state where privileged accounts were being used and not being monitored or even audited to our situation now where we are starting to monitor these privileged accounts more closely. That's where we show value in the product. Whenever a change is happening, we know because we find it in the logs. Our reporting and monitoring team is looking at it, and they are now starting to question changes that are associated with some kind of ticket or some kind CAB (change advisory board) request. It has improved our visibility for privileged access.

We have physical appliances for this solution. We went with that version of it because it was easier for us to deploy it and not have the IT engineers involved with our deployment. We wanted to control everything, from the deployment to the supportability to the usability of the product. I really enjoy the form factor of the appliance because it's definitely a change from the previous version, which was a bigger box. This one is a lot easier. It doesn't take up room on the rack, and it's very efficient as far as resources go.

The ease of use of the GUI is a really nice feature. It has a nice look and feel to it.

The actual checkout process is simple. You log into the portal and you're presented with accounts. That makes that so much easier because you don't have to go searching for stuff. It identifies what accounts you have, you click on it, and you go through the checkout process.

It's one of the best products we've seen. When you start looking at the functionality and use cases and usability of the product, it's straightforward. They designed this product with the end-user in mind, and they also had the sysadmin who is supporting the product in mind. They really did a nice job. Overall, it's a nice product to work with.

We use the Approval Anywhere feature and, through an app, it allows us to approve or deny requests. We don't have that turned on across the board, but we are turning it on slowly but surely. It adds an extra layer of security for critical passwords without adding time-consuming approval processes. That extra layer of security is our "belt and suspender" approach. It's making sure that you are approved to make a change, especially during production hours; it's approved by the person's manager.

From a usability perspective, what we are finding out is that our privileged domain admin users, in particular, want functionality for extending a checkout session. So we are working with One Identity support to see if there's an enhancement that can be made to the product. 

There is another area for improvement that I have sent over to One Identity. I said, "Whenever you check out a password, there should be a radio code associated with the password." That's something that we're trying to work on with them. It was submitted as a request for enhancement. Sometimes, you can't tell if an "O" is an "O" or a zero is a zero. If we had a radio code, the person could correctly read that password and make sure that they're not fat-fingering it.

We've been using One Identity Safeguard since the end of 2017, so it's a little over two years. I was also a user of the previous version, which was TPAM, for many more years in my previous role.

We have never had an issue with the software or even with the appliances.

It's very scalable. It doesn't matter what size of organization you have. If you have an organization of 1,000 or 100,000, the product is going to be scalable to your needs.

In our company, we have sporadic roles and we have about 55 users who are tuned into Safeguard. We're managing over 3,000 privileged accounts. Some of the users' roles are network administrators, IT administrators, help desk administrators, and InfoSec administrators. Our marketing team has users of the product, as they have applications whose passwords are being managed through Safeguard. We have a nice blend of users who are using the product daily. It has really done a good job of keeping up with the demand.

We definitely have plans to expand the usage of the product. Any area that's going to require some kind of privileged account, especially as we go through a digital transformation in deploying cloud services, Safeguard is going to be right there with us and will give us that flexibility to manage those kinds of accounts.

For deployment and maintenance of the solution we have a staff of one who reports directly to me. He's a senior cybersecurity engineer.

Safeguard's technical support is one of the better ones that I have worked with. There's always room for improvement, but every time that I do pick up the phone it's been fine. 

In my previous role I used Dell Quest TPAM, which was the previous version of Safeguard.

The initial setup was very straightforward because my team had the expertise in deploying a PAM solution, which was TPAM, in the past. This wasn't really that much different. We were able to deploy the full infrastructure, including DR redundancy, without Professional Services.

Because of scheduling conflicts, it took a few weeks to deploy. The main boxes were up within a week, but the full circle of deployment of the product was about a month or so because of those scheduling issues.

Standing up the appliance, plugging it in, and getting started was very straightforward. So kudos to One Identity for really listening to what the user population had to say about TPAM, because it is definitely reflected in the Safeguard product.

In terms of the effect on our privileged users, it's always going to be disruptive when you change something. People don't like change. We introduced this slowly but surely. We took a real "crawl, walk, run" type of methodology. We took the most basic use cases, and then we would update our support documentation to support the product. As we deployed it, we kept finding areas that we needed to document. It wasn't so easy to deploy something that was going to change somebody's workday process flow. But a year later, we're in a different state. It's been adopted and people are drinking from the same water hose.

We had in mind that we needed to handle the local administrator accounts and the privileged accounts, and we moved on from there. We knew that doing the local administrator account, which is really a non-human account, was going to give us the biggest bang for the buck. We knew that was something that we would achieve fairly quickly, and we did.

The training for end-users wasn't that bad. The product is straightforward. When you start working on a product with a lot of the features that you had suggested, in a previous version, be implemented, it's really nice to see that the company is listening to clients and the user population. That helped us in training our employees who use the product. The training was extremely straightforward, and people really caught onto it fairly quickly.

We absolutely see return on our investment. We're minimizing the risk of potential insider and external threats. We're managing all the privileged accounts, and we have minimized the risks of an account being hijacked and being used to compromise domains.

We are already seeing the return because we conduct annual penetration tests to see if we're able to compromise the network.

We evaluated CyberArk and BeyondTrust in addition to Safeguard. We went through a bake-off and Safeguard had one of the best sets of functionalities. It even had simple stuff for integration of a checkout proxy ID. You could check out the password and then it would just proxy to the endpoint. An example would an SSH session you needed for an account that was checked out.

CyberArk was going to require a lot of resources, both human and infrastructure resources, that we didn't have the bandwidth to take on. BeyondTrust fell short of some of the use cases that we had. One of the use cases was relationship. We had a core team that decided on the product and when the core team did its scoring, Safeguard came out just a little bit ahead of BeyondTrust and well ahead of CyberArk.

Start with your current state. That's what we did. Then, create a roadmap of where you are, where you need to be over the next five years. Once you're able to assess the current state and you have a plan in place, you can pick the product that's going to help you get to that future state.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this product is to be open-minded in trying to figure out where we could use some enhancements. Just because you choose a product you don't have to be 100 percent, all-in on the product. There is always room for opportunities. Whenever there is feedback or challenges, take them and then see what you can do better. My focus is the end-user who is using the product. We have to make sure that using this product doesn't affect users' day-to-day operations.

We started using the solution's behavior analytics feature but it never really took off because we got overwhelmed with other areas that we needed to address. It's something that is on the roadmap for us to eventually take a look at, or at least refresh the project plan and commit some time and some resources to it.

We are looking to integrate Safeguard with RSA. RSA has a component and we're looking to streamline the metrics around that component. When a product is brought online, there's a way for us to go in and do a scan of that machine or that endpoint. Ideally what should happen is that we'll go to Safeguard, check out a password, push that password to the vulnerability management scanner, and scan it. When that scan is done, it actually checks in the password and rotates it. It's our vulnerability management solution that we're looking to integrate. We're doing a PoC on that right now.

Safeguard is a next-generation tool when it comes to privileged access management. They have done a nice job figuring out all the features that need to be available out-of-the-box. I do have high expectations for Safeguard. I continue to look forward to future releases because I know it's going to get even better.

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 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 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 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.