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London Fire Brigade deploys Courion
London Fire Brigade implements access solution to automate password management and enforce consistent password policy for its 7,000 full-time firefighters and support staff.
“To provide round-the-clock service, we operate a two-shift, four-watch system at stations. Firefighters that don’t access their accounts on a daily basis often forget their passwords, which historically caused a huge volume of calls being logged with the service desk at each change of watch,” said Sally Devine, head of ICT contracts and support services at London Fire Brigade. “This placed unnecessary pressures on the service desk team, making it increasingly difficult for them to achieve the required SLAs in relation to other ICT services.”
The London Fire Brigade’s ICT team saw an opportunity to remedy the problem of excessive helpdesk calls to retrieve passwords during an operating system upgrade. With Courion’s solution in place, the Brigade’s Service Desk has seen a dramatic fall in calls requesting password resets; 5,016 staff, making up 73 per cent of all user accounts, have performed 8,288 successful password resets using Courion’s solution. The Service Desk in the same period has taken 4,903 calls to request password resets.
London Fire Brigade is the only fire service in the United Kingdom to employ only full-time firefighters and serves an area of 620 square miles incorporating all known types of fire risk from high risk, densely-populated inner city areas to suburban locations.
The Brigade – which has two data centres in Greenwich View Place and Wapping - operates a thin client, Microsoft and Citrix-based environment in a multi-user, multi-server setup. Whilst it makes heavy use of Microsoft Active Directory to set permissions and group policy, it also uses a number of bespoke applications.
Courion’s solution gives end users the ability to reset and synchronise passwords themselves whilst still enforcing password policies. This self-service password management capability can be used across a wide variety of enterprise systems.
Courion’s approach to identity, access and compliance management ensures that only the right people have access to resources. Access Assurance combines Access Governance, Access Compliance and Access Provisioning in the most complex environments.
