Challenge
POWER Fashion is a national South African value retailer, offering affordable clothing and footwear to the whole household. Founded over 65 years ago, the business currently operates over 170 corporate stores and knows operational excellence is paramount for its ambitious growth trajectory.
Though POWER Fashion had sought to secure their office workforce systems by implementing an array of multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions, such as Microsoft Authenticator, they identified areas of weakness — specifically, the ability to offer logins at the desktop level via Windows 10. Additionally, they needed an advanced solution that was capable of handling some unique requirements, such as older encryption protocols and providing traveling employees with offline accessibility.
“As we rolled out Office 365, we wanted to utilize best practices and international security standards so we researched modern trends — it’s pretty unanimous that MFA is the way to go,” said Jacques Vermeulen, Head of IT at POWER Fashion. “We started looking for MFA solutions and tried to get secure Windows 10 logins running, but it just wasn’t working for us. That’s when we started looking for alternative solutions.”
Solution
After listening to renowned fraud expert Frank Abagnale recommend Trusona’s product during a presentation, POWER Fashion looked into the company’s solutions and found it offered the most advanced and secure way to deliver next-gen MFA for their employees using Windows 10. The passwordless solution allowed them to authenticate their workforce with or without internet connectivity and uses Microsoft’s standard certificate- based security model, ensuring consistent and simple usability for users.
Additionally, when the company’s employees log into their desktops using Trusona’s passwordless MFA, they are automatically authenticated into Azure Active Directory and have instant access to Office 365. This provides a seamless, secure user experience and increased productivity for the workforce.
“In any IT department in today’s age, I think security is the chief consideration we spend the most time on,” said Vermeulen. “It has become clear that staying with the status quo of authentication was hazardous — even strict password policies were hard to enforce. A more secure and sustainable solution was needed. Luckily, Trusona is intuitive and easy to use. The solution provides the right level of security and a lot more comfort. I feel that we are well covered.”
POWER Fashion found that installing and deploying Trusona within their existing desktop infrastructure was a smooth process. They got the full solution up and running in 1-2 days without the need for software or hardware upgrades to their desktops, utilizing Microsoft Group Policy to remotely deploy the software to all applicable machines. The retailer attributed much of that success to Trusona’s customer success team who walked them through the process and offered quick responses during configuration.
“The support we’ve received really cemented the decision to choose Trusona,” said Vermeulen. “For me as an IT manager, the biggest measure of a partner is their ability to deal with issues should they occur. It can be difficult to gauge the quality of a solution’s support team beforehand, but I have never dealt with another product support team that puts in the amount of time that Trusona’s does. It has blown me away.”
Learn more about Trusona’s next-gen MFA for Windows 10.
Passwordless MFA
Learn more about Trusona’s next-gen MFA for Windows 10.
