International SOS to the Rescue With
Single Sign-on Salesforce Access

The Objective

Whether the problem is a sudden life-threatening stroke in Moscow or civil unrest in Mozambique, International SOS provides medical, clinical and security services for international business travelers and others who journey overseas. International SOS has a sales team of 1,300 in more than 90 sales offices around the globe, selling memberships to businesses, governments, NGOs, and individual travelers.

When International SOS realized it needed a more robust and state-of-the-art CRM system, it turned to software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Salesforce.com. And for a global identity management solution—one that would integrate easily with the company’s existing Microsoft environment, enable single sign-on (SSO) for users, and provide automated user provisioning to the Salesforce.com applications—Salesforce.com recommended Ping Identity.

The Challenge

International SOS knew it needed to implement access to Salesforce.com applications as efficiently and effortlessly as possible. The busy IT department was hard-pressed to find any down hours to carry out maintenance and updates, much less to upgrade to a new identity management system. The identity management solution had to integrate with Microsoft Active Directory (AD). And, the global company must address the varied and specific needs of sales and marketing teams around the world.

The Solution

International SOS deployed Ping Identity’s PingFederate and the Salesforce SaaS Connector. The solution enables SSO and automated cloud user provisioning to Salesforce Sales Cloud, Chatter, and Force.com—anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Remarkably for such a far-flung global organization, total implementation took less than a month.

“PingFederate had out-of-the-box interoperability with Active Directory and enabled SSO for both our Microsoft and Salesforce applications. We didn’t have to ask our sales team to create even one more username and password to access the apps they use,” said Indu Nayak, Project Manager for Salesforce.com at International SOS.

Nayak has been especially pleased with the cloud provisioning capabilities of the PingFederate solution. The software automatically creates, updates, and disables user accounts for Salesforce.com applications through synchronization with AD. He added, “All we have to do is monitor a single place. When someone leaves the company, HR sends an email message, and the user is automatically deactivated in Salesforce.”