RSA SecurID^® Access

Challenge

Authentication performance can suffer when high numbers of users must log on from geographically remote offices across a WAN.

Potential use cases

Organisation is utilising base licenses and suffering from general latency/ performance issues at secondary sites

Organisation opens new secondary office or site

New sites acquired as part of corporate merger or buyout

Solution

	With RSA SecurID Access Enterprise and Premium, your customers can improve performance and reliability by locating replica instances physically closer to the users who require authentication.
	An organization with a headquarters and multiple remote sites can reduce the distance-based latency and improve authentication performance by placing a SecurID Access replica instance at each remote site.

Conversation starters

1. Are your users facing a few seconds of delay when being faced with authentication?
2. Do you have offices across multiple regions/countries?
3. Do you have any upcoming plans to onboard a high number of staff in a new location?
   (e.g. new office site or merger)

Challenge

Without replica instances, disaster recovery is limited. This could result in otherwise avoidable authentication downtime due to maintenance, power cuts, network outages or fire and flood damage.

Potential use cases

RSA SecurID Access Enterprise and Premium allows your customers to avoid suspending authentication by creating up to 14 replica instances that can be promoted to the primary instance as disaster recovery, if the primary instance is unresponsive, or as a temporary failover for maintenance.

By making sure deployments have sufficient instances installed to provide authentication while repairs are made, authentication can continue to take place while the primary instance is repaired or if a network connection between sites fails.

Solution

	Satellite office loses connection with HQ or main datacentre without causing local authentication downtime
	Maintenance work required on primary instance doesn’t impact authentication capabilities
	Replica instance fails over following fire, flood or blackout at primary or secondary site
	Replica instances can support a sudden increase in the number of remote authentications when Business Continuity licenses are activated, leading to an unprecedented surge of users authenticating remotely, e.g. as seen with Covid-19.

Conversation starters

1. Have you had any instances of unplanned authentication downtime in the recent past?
2. Do you have any backup capabilities for your authentication estate?
3. What do you do to keep protecting users and data during planned downtime?

Challenge

As your customer’s business continues to grow, they must consider the size of their current user population and the anticipated size of their future user population to prepare for the increased demand for authentication.

Potential use cases

Prepare for spikes in demand, e.g. at the start of the day and after lunch, without reduced impact on performance.

Improve performance at remote sites with significant user populations.

Utilise bulk administrator (AMBA) to quickly onboard new users and ensure optimum ongoing performance.

Solution

	RSA’s SecurID Enterprise and Premium scalability features allow your customer to support growth and temporary peaks in demand.
	As your customer’s business grows, a multiple replica instance installed on hardware that meets or exceeds the minimum system requirements can help to ensure they have excess capacity to handle increases in demand.

Conversation starters

1. Do you experience latency or performance issues at the start of the day or during spikes of activity?
2. Is adding new users laborious and time-consuming?
3. Do you have any upcoming plans to onboard a high number of staff in a new location? (e.g. new office site or merger)

Challenge

Manual provisioning of new users, removal of old users and changes to policies and groups is a time-consuming and laborious task without automation capabilities.

Potential use cases

Quickly onboard and manage new users:

Onboard new departments, or even offices.

Quickly roll out SecurID across entire enterprise.

Scale from pilot quickly and efficiently.

Solution

	With Enterprise and Premium, your customers gain access to Authentication Manager Bulk Administration (AMBA). This tool greatly reduces the time required for administrators to manage users, groups, tokens and actions.
	This greatly lowers operational costs and prevents administrators from having to manually add or amend users and distribute tokens one by one, allowing IT resources to be utilised on more strategic projects, upgrades and optimisation.

Conversation starters

1. How much time are your administrators spending managing users and groups?
2. Are you in control of your expired users and old groups?
3. Do you ever need to onboard or remove large numbers of users at one time?

Challenge

Authentication every single time an application, network or device is accessed could result in a loss of productivity, especially if it takes a while to authenticate each time.

Potential use cases

Reduce friction with users by reducing requirement to authenticate.

Instantly identify suspicious out-of-ordinary behavior.

Improve security posture and make informed identity context driven risk management decisions.

Solution

	With Premium, your customers can leverage Risk Based Identity Confidence to authenticate based on levels of confidence accrued by reviewing user behaviour, location and device.
	This reduces friction for users by silently reviewing in the background, only requesting authentication when the access confidence score is lower than required. This also allows for an active review of individual use cases and user sets to increase security confidence for key applications or access requirements such as CRM.

Conversation starters

1. Are your users authenticating at every login?
2. Do you experience resistance around authentication from users?
3. Can you determine the effectiveness of your security policies?