Everence Restores Belief in SSO and Seamless Access

The Objective

Everence is a faith-based, member-led organization out of Indiana that provides financial services to individuals, congregations, and organizations. Everence has three different websites: one for employees, one for external members, and a third for institutional organizations.

The websites are used by a total of 500 employees and 10,000 external users to manage investments, process health insurance claims, and more. Using CA Siteminder for their single sign-on (SSO) and access management needs was burdening their lean team. Mark Byler, Senior Developer at Everence, wanted an easy-to-use solution that would provide a secure, streamlined experience for both internal and external users.

The Challenge

Everence didn’t have the resources or expertise to manage the complex updates and maintenance required by CA Siteminder. Doing so was taking the team’s focus away from other areas of their business. The websites had uptime issues, and users were frustrated by a clunky login process. Everence needed a platform that could solve for both single sign-on and access management while being standards-based and scalable to meet their future needs.

The Solution

Byler quickly identified the Ping Identity Platform as a solution that would offer both seamless SSO to their applications and highly secure access management to their existing web applications and future mobile applications. His team tested their most critical SSO connections and website access controls to confirm that Ping could more than replace their existing system.

The easy installation and configuration, fully supported by Ping’s technical team, was an ideal match for the team’s limited bandwidth and resources. Byler explains, “Installing CA single sign-on would require days of going through scripts and reading user manuals and trying to figure out what the right settings were. With PingFederate, you just run a batch file and it works. It’s been fantastic for us.”

The solution also satisfied the Everence marketing team’s desires to improve the user experience and customize it to the organization’s brand. “The flexibility of the branding process was pretty remarkable,” Byler said. What’s more, Everence leveraged self-service password reset features to provide their users with more control over their own accounts, simultaneously reducing the burden on support.