Sybase

Enhances Security and Increases Productivity

The Challenge

Managing employee passwords had become a significant problem for Sybase, with rising support costs, compromised security and lost productivity. Sybase was a growing company with more than 7,000 employees in 79 locations worldwide. With a growing IT infrastructure, employees had to remember many passwords, each for a different system or application. Employee response to the password explosion was to avoid password changes. When employees also often forgot their own passwords to the many applications, it created a high help desk call volume.

At the same time, employees were responding to password complexity by choosing simple passwords, by writing down their passwords and by avoiding password changes. This compromised corporate security.

IT management at Sybase was tasked with lowering IT support costs. An analysis of help desk call volumes showed that password resets consumed the largest portion of help desk staff time. To address these problems, Sybase had to find a password management solution that would integrate with its many existing systems and applications.

The Solution

Bravura Pass is a total password management solution, automating web- and telephone-based management of passwords and tokens for both internal users and external customers.

Bravura Pass synchronizes user passwords across all systems at Sybase. It enforces an enterprise-wide password strength policy and allows authenticated users to reset their own forgotten passwords. The solution enables support staff to reset caller passwords without needing their own administrative account.

Transparent password synchronization was key to the success of Bravura Pass at Sybase. Over sixty per cent of Sybase's employees have never seen the Bravura Pass user interface, but nonetheless use it regularly.

Self-service password reset allowed Sybase users who had forgotten their passwords to authenticate to Bravura Pass using a hardware token or by answering personal questions, avoiding a help desk call.

The Outcome

A substantial reduction in calls to the help desk, enhanced security, increased productivity and user satisfaction made the implementation a success.

Almost immediately following the Bravura Pass installation, Sybase realized an eighty-five per cent reduction in password reset calls to the helpdesk. Of the fifteen per cent remaining, fifty-three per cent involved password resets on systems not yet integrated with Bravura Pass.

The time it took for a support analyst to reset a password was also substantially reduced, from ten to twenty minutes, depending on the call, to about one minute. Such a significant time savings enabled support analysts to work on other tasks and better meet service level agreements.

Since deploying Bravura Pass, Sybase's security has been tremendously enhanced.

Bravura Security at a Glance

Bravura Security is the only industry leader delivering identity and privileged access management across a single platform to ease implementation as your IAM and PAM roadmaps evolve.