Bear Stearns has selected Courion Corporation's PasswordCourier and ProfileBuilder solutions to provide its 10,000 employees worldwide with the ability to self-manage authentication credentials and reset, change, and synchronise passwords on business-critical systems and applications.
Bob Garbarino, senior managing director, Bear Stearns, says the company's IT support centre fields hundreds of calls a month from employees that are locked out of systems because of simple password issues. "With 10,000 employees to support on a wide variety of systems, having our support people spend so much time dealing with a simple administration problem like forgotten passwords is a waste of resources," he says.
The Courion technology will be integrated with Bear Stearns' Remedy service desk system to ensure that all password management activities, including changes, user information, time to resolution, and workstation IP address, are automatically logged for service management tracking and audit purposes, and any security violations are flagged immediately for system administrators.
PasswordCourier and ProfileBuilder will also be integrated with Bear Stearns' corporate authentication database to offer employees a private, self-service way to specify unique challenge/response questions and answers for secure authentication when resetting passwords.