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Challenge
Georgian, a fintech company investing in high-growth technology businesses, has built a platform designed to provide a next-generation experience of growth capital for software company CEOs and their teams. Georgian’s platform is designed to identify and accelerate the best growth-stage software companies, taking a data-first approach to solving the key challenges they face.
While Georgian had previously sought to secure their systems by implementing a variety of multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions, they found shortcomings with the poor user experience and security of having to type numbers and one- time passcodes (OTP). Furthermore, from an administrative perspective, one of the looming issues was that of uniform compliance as some users were not utilizing the provided authentication methods.
“To modernize our security architecture and effectively protect our system credentials, we wanted to consolidate all of our key applications under a single identity provider,” said Alex Manea, CISO at Georgian. “We then thought it was critical to evolve to a scalable passwordless solution that not only makes it easier to manage, but also offers our employees and partners a great experience that they love to use.”
Solution
With Trusona’s focus on both security and user experience, Georgian decided to evaluate their solutions. Initially, the company embarked on an exploratory phase, using the WordPress passwordless plugin for authenticating to its website. After receiving positive feedback from the early adopters, Georgian then implemented Trusona with additional systems, primarily protecting their Office 365 accounts through their Azure Active Directory tenant.
From there, the company quickly made the decision to adopt Trusona’s passwordless MFA solution with their Okta identity and access management system (IAM), protecting all of their enterprise applications on a global scale.
“We’re building security and privacy into everything we do, and we fundamentally don’t think that passwords are compatible with a trust-first mindset,” said Manea. “Removing them is the single most important thing you can do to dramatically reduce your attack surface. This is the biggest step we’ve taken on our journey to increase security, and it’s been a game changer for us.”
Georgian found that installing and deploying Trusona was surprisingly seamless. The company noted how the ability to associate an identity with a user and device with multiple email addresses made the rollout even simpler.
“The entire installation, configuration and deployment was done in 3-4 hours,” said Miguel Young, IT and Security Manager at Georgian. “We have very high security requirements because of the nature of our business, and Trusona let us meet those with minimal fuss. We can have multiple identity providers for our legacy apps that we’re starting to sunset and we know exactly what the requirements are for anything new, easily placing them behind our SSO with Trusona taking care of the authentication.”
Beyond the logistics of deploying a passwordless MFA solution, Georgian also wanted to ensure widespread adoption of the technology, including people working for — and with — the company. With a standardized solution no longer reliant on passwords or password managers, Georgian can scale access to its platform more widely without having to compromise on security for a better user experience.
“This was the one of the biggest migrations I’ve run at Georgian and by far the smoothest,” said Young. “The fantastic Trusona UX helped us sway the overall organization and ensure a smooth rollout. From the vision to the infrastructure all the way to the end users, it’s been a very positive experience. It was also great to have Trusona’s customer success team with us every step of the way to speed up delivery and make sure we followed best practices.”
Enhanced security and usability has also saved Georgian a significant amount of money and better protected the valuable time of their IT team now that password resets and account lockouts have effectively been eliminated. According to Gartner, 30-50% of all IT help desk tickets are attributed to password management.
“It’s pretty rare these days that we have to reset someone’s password,” said Young. “When you think of the job description of an IT analyst or manager, user password management is typically one of the first things that comes to mind. Instead, we’re able to use the time to focus on much higher value work.”
As a significant shift in how people think about identity and credential management, Georgian understands that removing passwords is a disruptive notion — yet, a critical action that needs widespread adoption in their industry and beyond.
“We’re really only starting to see the benefits we’ve unlocked so far,” said Manea. “We’re confident that as we continue growing our organization, we’re not sacrificing security for collaboration or usability. Eliminating passwords is a key foundational step that lets us securely authenticate users from anywhere in the world into our platform, and we weren’t able to do that until we deployed Trusona.”
Passwordless MFA
Learn more about Trusona’s passwordless multi-factor authentication.
