Workforce Solutions Texas is an organisation based in Central Texas that administers the workforce investment act by helping people who have been displaced or unemployed in its seven-county area. The organisation helps people by equipping them with the necessary skills needed to succeed in a work environment.
As an organisation, the turnover rate of permanent staff is fairly low. However, it has a section that works with military veterans who take on a short role for just two to three months, meaning there is a significant number of high turnover temporary staff.
Workforce Solutions Texas employs 110 people all of who require regular access to the organisation’s network.
The Challenge
Secure Network Access For Temporary Employees
The IT department is essentially a small team of three people and they manage the network, servers, telephony and anything else relating to technology for the organisation. One of the main problems the team faced was that employees shared passwords. Whenever there was a new employee, most likely a temporary one, and they did not have a password, someone would share theirs with them.
Tracking access to the network became a security concern because of the concurrent logins. For example, if there are multiple authenticated sessions going on at the same time and a critical change is made, tracing who made the change would be a problem.
Essentially, a consistent flow of temporary staff that needed network access meant difficulties in managing that access, which lead to the poor practices of password sharing and concurrent logins.
Workforce Solutions Texas used Active Directory and did not have a software solution in place that would help them solve the issue of concurrent logins.
The Solution
Granular access controls that ensure unique user logins
The information systems manager did a web search on solutions for concurrent logins and IS Decisions came up on top. The IT team decided to purchase UserLock as it provided the ideal solution to the problem of concurrent logins that they faced.
The set up was fairly easy and it took just a few days to implement. There was no training required but employees were sent a notification informing them that from a technical standpoint, they would no longer be able to login to two devices at the same time.
In the organisation, there are some members of the leadership team who need to login to more than one device at a time. To solve this issue, the IT team created a security group allowing only these individuals to have concurrent logins. With this set up, they are able to log into a training room, for example, but at the same time also be logged in at their desk.
The Benefits
Improved security on all users (permanent and temporary) access to the network
Following the implementation of UserLock, Workforce Solutions has been able to –
- Easily manage network access for temporary staff, implementing granular rules and restrictions for these staff, and enabling the team to follow a simple ‘exit procedure’ to disable access once staffs’ employment term has ended
- Combat concurrent logins, further discouraging password sharing as users are significantly less likely to share their login if someone else using it restricts their own access
- Monitor user access to track and detect potential security issues, as well as help manage workstation resource
Workforce Solutions Central Texas implemented UserLock in September 2009 and has renewed its licences every year since.