Westinghouse Rail Systems Gets Employee Productivity On the Right Track With Imprivata

OneSign Appliance Boosts User Satisfaction and Productivity, Drives Down Helpdesk Costs

LEXINGTON, MA - 17 August 2009 - Imprivata®, Inc the employee access management company, today announced that Westinghouse Rail Systems, a world leader in advanced signaling and integrated control systems for railways, has implemented Imprivata OneSign® to provide employees across five major UK sites and 11 global satellite sites with improved access to a range of business-critical applications via strong authentication management, finger biometrics and single sign-on.

Through Imprivata partner Somerford Associates, the roll-out of OneSign to more than 1,500 Westinghouse employees has enabled the organisation to reduce IT help desk costs by cutting down password reset calls significantly. Westinghouse has also improved employee productivity and user satisfaction by replacing complex multiple password requirements for more than 15 disparate applications including the HR intranet, expenses, web-driven and legacy applications with single sign-on delivered through the OneSign appliance.

This was achieved by Westinghouse providing a small and dedicated project implementation team headed up by Dave Skinner in the role of Project Manager and John Woodriff as the Application Architect. The project was fully implemented across all UK sites within six weeks from start to finish. Plans are in motion for the application to be implemented across other part of the Rail Group of companies to build on the success at Westinghouse.

To test the suitability of the OneSign solution, Westinghouse’s IT team ran a successful pilot with selected key trial users from across the organisation, and decided to rollout the solution across the business following positive feedback from employees involved in the scheme.

Additionally, via OneSign, Westinghouse has enabled fingerprint biometrics as a secondary factor of secure authentication for IT staff, providing an extra layer of security for mobile workers and IT staff using critical applications. With OneSign now delivering streamlined access to users at the organisation’s main site in Chippenham, the IT project team has also installed a secondary appliance at a disaster recovery site in Euston, to ensure employees can continue to access applications via single sign-on even in the event of an IT outage.

“An IT satisfaction survey showed that our users’ major frustration was having to remember multiple passwords for applications; on top of those passwords that were being reset at regular intervals, leading to locked out unproductive staff,” said John Woodriff, Application Architect, Westinghouse Rail Systems. “With OneSign, we are able to simplify user access through single sign-on which helps boost employee productivity by streamlining the log-on process, reducing the number of locked out users whilst delivering the right levels of security for our organisation.”

“Organisations globally face similar pain points around employee access management, whereby securing applications and ensuring employee productivity are often conflicting business objectives,” said Omar Hussain, CEO, Imprivata. “By implementing Imprivata OneSign, hundreds of organisations from various sectors are addressing these challenges head on, and at the same time helping to significantly reduce helpdesk related costs by streamlining access to business applications and data.”
About Imprivata
Imprivata secures employee access to desktops, networks, applications and transactions. Its appliance-based, employee access management platform, OneSign, enables organizations to protect enterprise information assets while improving user productivity. By strengthening user authentication, streamlining application access and simplifying compliance reporting across multiple computing environments, customers realize substantial IT Help Desk and administration cost savings, while achieving the security standards they demand.

Imprivata is a recognised leader in Authentication and Access Management, receiving numerous product awards and top review ratings from leading industry publications and analysts. Headquartered in Lexington, Mass., Imprivata partners with over 200 resellers, and serves the access security needs of more than 800 customers around the world. For more information, please visit www.imprivata.com
Imprivata is a registered trademark of Imprivata, Inc. in the USA and other countries. All other product or company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.
About Westinghouse
Westinghouse Rail Systems Limited, part of the global Invensys Rail Group, is a world leader in advanced signalling and integrated control systems for mainline and mass transit railways.
The organisation has been signalling railways for over 150 years,and the company’s products and systems are at the heart of many of the world’s major transport networks - from simple, single lines to heavy haul freight, inter-city, suburban and urban mass transit railways.
About Somerford Associates
Somerford provides innovative security solutions for the challenging area of Identity and Access Management. In its simplest form, Somerford ensures that the right person has access to the right information at the right time. This not only protects corporate assets, but it also ensures that staff, customers and suppliers can all be productive as they have timely access to relevant information.
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Imprivata is a registered trademark of Imprivata, Inc. in the USA and other countries. All other product or company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.