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How 1Password’s SSO integration helped Frontiers revamp their security program

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Publishing groundbreaking discoveries by the world's top experts, Frontiers is the third most-cited and sixth largest research publisher. Frontiers' research articles have been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, reflecting the power of research that is open for all. frontiersin.org

Industry

  • Media

Use Cases

  • Unlock with SSO
  • Increased EPM adoption
  • Faster employee onboarding

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Frontiers team member wearing gloves in research lab
Frontiers team member wearing gloves in research lab

Key results

  • Simplified security administration with Unlock with SSO.

  • Increased employee adoption and productivity across more than 1,400 employees.

  • Reduced IT time spent onboarding new employees and resetting forgotten passwords.

  • New employees can be productive from day one because they immediately have access to important shared logins.

Background

Frontiers accelerates scientific discovery by making science open. They place the researcher at the center and enable the research community to develop the solutions the world needs to live healthy lives on a healthy planet.

Critical information flows through the Frontiers platform, but before adopting 1Password, Frontiers didn’t have a global password management solution.

“We managed passwords through a local password manager,” Frontiers Cybersecurity Lead Diego de Haller says. “You would end up finding that passwords were reused between different services.”

Frontiers recognized the need to step up its security. De Haller was brought into the technology team to focus on and build out the organization’s cybersecurity program from scratch.

Password management is critical for security. Employees were using duplicates and protected Word files containing passwords before moving to 1Password.

Diego de Haller

Cybersecurity Lead of the Technology Department

Unlock with SSO – the final piece of Frontiers’ authentication puzzle

Frontiers’ new approach to security is to “guarantee the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of applications.”

De Haller had used 1Password for many years prior to joining Frontiers, including at his previous company. He knew what a difference introducing 1Password would make to Frontiers’ workflows, saving staff time and energy while keeping them – and the business – secure.

The company was already using Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform that comes with its own single sign-on (SSO) solution.

De Haller soon discovered that he could use Azure and 1Password together to streamline his team’s security processes. He implemented 1Password’s Unlock with SSO feature so employees could use their Azure credentials to quickly sign in to and unlock 1Password.

If we provide this solution, there are no excuses. Staff can’t say it’s difficult to use, or it’s difficult to access. Because it’s easy to use, and now it’s easier to access.

Diego de Haller

Cybersecurity Lead of the Technology Department

As a result, employees no longer had to create and remember a new set of credentials to start using 1Password. Adoption was streamlined, and it was now easy for team members to start using strong, unique passwords for everything at work.

Within the first week, more than half of Frontiers’ employees started using 1Password. Since then, De Haller and his team have onboarded more than 1,400 employees globally.

“One of the things that makes adopting 1Password even easier is single sign-on (SSO),” De Haller says. “Employees don’t need to remember the master password, which means that even if some people forget that password, they won’t need to request a recovery.”

Planning for future success

The goal wasn’t just to get existing employees working more securely. De Haller also wanted to make sure that new employees had access to 1Password as soon as they started.

He took advantage of 1Password SCIM Bridge to make onboarding (and offboarding) employees simple. De Haller’s security team saves time as provisioning is simplified for each new employee. “Every time we deploy a new laptop, we put 1Password in place to ensure that the laptop is secure,” he explains. Now, new employees get access to shared logins on day one – getting them off to a quick and secure start.

1Password is a great product. I’m really happy. And the proof of that is that wherever I go, I try to work with 1Password.

Diego de Haller

Cybersecurity Lead of the Technology Department

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