Leading energy company simplifies compliance adherence with MFA and SSO

Regulatory compliance agencies take protecting industrial IoT very seriously in Alberta, Canada. After all, a breach poses a significant threat to critical infrastructure Canadian residents depend on. Integrated energy companies like our client need a way to prevent unnecessary traffic from entering their OT network while connecting to their corporate IT network. Our client turned to UserLock to provide a secure MFA connection between the two networks.

The Challenge Meeting regulatory needs to protect electronic security perimeter

Even with network segmentation in place, a DMZ alone isn’t enough to fortify an OT network against unwanted traffic. Compliance regulations in Alberta, Canada require any entity that sells power to the electrical grid to implement multi-factor authentication to protect the electronic security perimeter, too. That drove our client’s senior control systems specialist to search for a simple, cost-effective MFA solution to support his team’s users.

For him, many popular MFA solutions have an oversized application footprint that don’t support his user base. These solutions often require extensive hardware set-ups and come with high price points. This drove him to research easy-to-implement, more lightweight MFA solutions.

UserLock’s great reviews, detailed web content, and helpful developer team drove him to give UserLock a try.

The Solution An easy-to-deploy MFA solution that simplifies compliance adherence

Before committing to to UserLock, the senior control systems specialist reached out to our development team with a few technical questions. Specifically, he wanted more information about implementing the solution into a DMZ network. Our knowledgeable developer team quickly responded, guiding him on implementation best practices and offering him the information he needed to move forward. With that insight in mind, he installed UserLock mere days after choosing to work with us.

Our client’s team chose to leverage authenticator applications to provide secure access for their users. Even though UserLock offers other cutting-edge capabilities for authentication like push notifications, they appreciate that UserLock’s baseline solution provides the exact level of complexity they were looking for.

To make MFA even more user-friendly, our client also introduced UserLock’s single sign-on (SSO) feature within the team’s internal applications. This feature makes it easy for authorized users to seamlessly verify their identity and access applications without interrupting their workflows.

Since UserLock extends on existing Windows Active Directory infrastructure, our client found it was simple to adjust the settings to fit his needs. Rather than spending days or weeks configuring a complex, custom solution, they chose UserLock to help become compliant as quickly as possible.

The Benefits A seamless transition to MFA that ticks all compliance boxes

With UserLock, maintaining Alberta’s strict compliance requirements around identity and access management became a breeze. Within hours of set up, our client’s IT team had the capabilities needed to verify user identities linked to Active Directory and simplify logins for users allowed access to the OT network. Plus, after his initial conversation with our developer team, the control systems specialist hasn’t needed to submit a single support ticket since his implementation.

Even a year after implementation, UserLock’s MFA and SSO capabilities have remained a great fit to secure access to the DMZ network and meet our client’s strict compliance requirements.

After such a positive experience working with UserLock, he is eager to recommend the solution. While our solution fits his unique requirement for a fully-functional MFA solution with a small footprint, he sees how UserLock would be equally appropriate to scale across any size of user base.