Call Center Network Security - Verifying User Identity at Teleperformance

Teleperformance is a worldwide leader in outsourced omnichannel customer experience management. The company provides customer acquisition, customer care, technical support, debt collection, social media, and other specialized services around the world.

Operating within high risk areas such as customer service channels, the protection of customer data, payment data and other sensitive information is key for Teleperformance. Maintaining compliance with ISO 27001 and PCI DSS is a powerful indication to customers that the company takes security seriously.

The Challenge Limit users to one session to meet compliance and internal security policies

At Teleperformance, employees work in an open space. Users don’t have their own machine, they arrive and connect to the first available machine.

To protect against fraud and be compliant, the company needed to verify that the person who authenticates is who they say they are. They therefore needed to limit concurrent sessions to only one session per user. This limit helps reduce the risk of employees having unnecessary exposure to personal identifiable information or confidential information.

Uncontrolled concurrent logins to a network remains a serious security flaw and significantly increases network vulnerability. It only takes a careless employee to share a password or leave a workstation unattended for a security breach to occur.

Previously they used scripts to limit simultaneous sessions but the script that they were using was no longer supported on Windows Server 2012 R2. They were therefore looking for a solution that would allow them to eliminate the usage of GPO’s.

Solutions based on windows logon scripts also present too many drawbacks and weaknesses to suit such organizations that are serious about security.

The Solution Total control of user accounts

José Miguel Villafuerte, IT Infrastructure & Datacenter Regional Manager at Teleperformance was assigned the task to find a third party solution that would meet their requirements. After his own online research, the company decided to try IS Decisions’ UserLock. After a quick trial period, they immediately saw that the software’s functionalities was matching their needs to meet internal security policies. They didn’t have to try any other solution.

Being able to easily manage their users by groups and organizational units helped simplify the administrators working day.

José also found the reports to be an extremely useful tool. UserLock records and reports on all user connection events to provide a central audit across the whole network. With this they could easily view the start and end of a session opened on the network to spot any anomalies or suspicious behavior.

The Benefits Verify all users’ identity, at any time, for compliance and internal security policies

UserLock’s ability to control, protect and monitor user’s logons mixed with the alerting and reporting tools helped Teleperformance secure their network and meet compliance requirements. Controlling system access, verifying employees' claimed identity, restricting users from sharing logins and preventing simultaneous logins are all key elements required for compliance with major industry regulations.

To learn more about how logon management helps meet compliance objectives, read the whitepaper Why compliance starts with the logon.