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Lovells LLP

Signify provides flexible strong authentication for legal clients and staff

Lovells is one of the world's leading international law firms, with over three thousand people operating from 26 offices in Europe, Asia and the United States, advising many of the world's largest corporations, financial institutions and government organisations. With such a global reach, the firm’s professionals need immediate access to information and resources, while at the same time, the firm needs to be reassured that the data is highly secure.

Initially, Lovells ran and managed RSA token-based authentication servers in-house but as demand for 24x7 non-stop access grew, this was proving time consuming and demanded more specialist skills and resources, and the decision was made to outsource RSA SecurID operations.

Alleviate IT strain by outsourcing

“We look to focus our resources on core business applications and see the benefit in outsourcing specific IT processes and management functions to specialists, if they can prove their reliability and trustworthiness,” said Stuart Robbins, Information Security Analyst.  “Signify’s thoroughness was impressive and they managed the migration from our in-house RSA ACE systems to their service very smoothly and quickly.”  

Convenient, cost effective system

“Our users want an easy to use system that is always available, while our IT department need a highly secure and reliable solution that is simple to deploy, manage and scale; and that’s what Signify gives us” commented Warner Beekmeyer, Network Security Manager.  “The automation of token logistics saves us real time and cost,” added Stuart Robbins.

Easy IT Management

Since the initial migration of a few hundred staff and tokens in 2006, demand has grown rapidly and Signify now authenticates more than 1500 users worldwide including staff and partners as well as third party clients and advisors using the Extranet services.

From a technical perspective, Lovells’ Citrix and Extranet servers are configured to communicate with Signify's ‘in the cloud’ Authentication Service over encrypted connections, while Lovells’ IT and HR administrators can manage every aspect of the service via the Signify Identity Management Centre (IMC) web portal.

“The Signify managed service has provided us with a secure, fault-resilient and easy-to-use remote access service and has freed up our in-house IT teams to focus on other key challenges,” said Warner Beekmeyer.

Simple administration and role delegation

“We can enforce our corporate security policy, add or remove users and delegate management responsibility to local administrators thanks to Signify’s powerful IMC," said Stuart Robbins."The reporting tools provide all the service visibility and usage information we need, as the IMC lets us track and trace every token.”

Looking to the future

Lovells is now looking at other ways it can extend the use of the Signify service, including securing WiFi access points within its main global offices and providing secure but token-less authentication of contractors, third-party and other temporary users, using Signify’s Passcode OnDemand service.  

By potentially extending this mobile phone-based service to all staff on a short term ‘In Case of Emergency’ basis, Signify may even be able to help Lovells Disaster Recovery planning and minimise any interruption to business caused by  major incidents or disasters whether due to extreme climate, transport disruption or terrorist threats. 

_{RSA and RSA SecurID are trademarks of RSA Security Inc}