Axiad Conductor

Our use case is credential management for one of the business units. Axiad provides credential management for those users, including the creation of new credentials and life cycle management of them. When credentials expire, users can self-serve and perform updates.

We were looking for a way for users to self-serve and increase productivity. Before Axiad Cloud, every time a user was locked out they would have to call the help desk and wait for someone to call back and help them recover their accounts. Now users can do it themselves and cut down on the time they are down with an expired credential. That was the primary driver for why we looked at using this solution.

The biggest benefit is that Axiad Cloud has increased the productivity of the business unit where it has been deployed. Before, we had anywhere between 10 and 15 percent of our users that were, at any given time, not able to sign into their systems because of expired credentials. With the introduction of the solution for that business unit, that number went down. That's a measurable advantage. Users also say it is much easier to use but that is not something that we can measure.

The life cycle management of credentials is the aspect that we have found to be the most useful. The solution does other things such as act as a certificate of authority, but we don't really use any of them because we already had a certificate of authority in place. The differentiator that Axiad provided was the ability to provide users a way to self-serve the updating of their credentials on their private keys. That was the feature we were most interested in and Axiad does an excellent job of it.

I have been using Axiad Cloud for four years.

It's pretty stable. We're talking about a solution used for credential management and that involves login and access to systems. Those processes have high visibility so if anything were to go wrong with that, we would know about it.

As far as I know, for however long we have used the solution, there have not been any unplanned outages. There have been planned outages during which they were upgrading systems, but it has never gone out so that we were unable to use it.

The way it's designed, it's supposed to be very scalable. I did speak to them about the possibility of rolling it out enterprise-wide, which would have meant 80,000 to 100,000 users. They told me they could leverage the same deployment we have today without having to add to it. It would just be a matter of purchasing additional licenses. They explained that the architecture behind it, like any other cloud deployment nowadays, has the ability to scale up and down on demand. That indicated to me that it's pretty scalable.

We started with about 5,000 users and, over the last few years, it's grown to between 7,000 to 8,000 users, maybe even more.

However, with their licensing model, it becomes hard to scale. For example, we couldn't roll it out enterprise-wide because if you scale it across more than 100,000 users, the cost becomes too exorbitant. That's one area where, if they structure the pricing differently, similar to other products, it would be easy to adapt enterprise-wide.

Before using Axiad, users were logging into the system in a different way. We switched over to security keys and we needed a way to manage the certificates on those keys. We didn't have anything like Axiad before we introduced it.

Prior to that, users would call the help desk and try to resolve their access issues. It was a manual, traditional way of resolving access issues.

They deployed a dedicated instance for us that we renew every year. It's all cloud. The on-prem components are not Axiad, per se. The solution is 100 percent on the cloud.

I was involved in the deployment from an architectural perspective. I helped in defining what we needed, in looking at the marketplace for solutions, and then I worked with the delivery and engineering teams to implement and deploy it.

The deployment was very straightforward, partly because Axiad was there to help with every aspect of it. There were only two complicated parts. The first was that we are in a very regulated industry, so there are a lot of requirements that the vendor has to meet. It was the very first time they were deploying in our type of environment, so it was a little bit challenging to get Axiad through all those checks and requirements.

Secondly, to connect Axiad Cloud to our internal environment, there were a number of requirements that we had to ensure were met. The logistics of going through the checks that were needed to make it happen, because Axiad at that time was a small company and hadn't done many other larger integrations, was the hardest part.

If we were deploying it today, perhaps it would be different because they've been around for a while now, but at that time it was a little bit challenging.

There is no maintenance of the solution on our side. They provide the service to us and we consume that service. We don't deal with any maintenance of the solution.

Axiad had four people involved in different roles, including two engineers who were hands-on and dedicated to working with our team. On our side, both the networking team, with one person dedicated to this project, and the Active Directory/Certificates team, with another two or three people, were involved.

We did some calculations to determine how much it costs when a user calls the help desk to have an issue resolved. We tried to estimate how much time was wasted while they were waiting to be helped and how much we paid the help desk agent who was helping them. We came up with a figure of around $120 per user, per incident. The licensing for Axiad, per user, was less than that.

In terms of return on investment, we estimate it at somewhere between 10 and 15 percent savings per user.

As part of our due diligence we did review other solutions, but that was four or five years ago. We initially looked at three solutions, narrowed it down to two, and, after speaking with both, chose Axiad.

You have to understand the number of users and the number of devices that are going to use the solution. I'm saying that because of my experience with the licensing part. That's my one gripe. If you approach it the way we did, starting with one business unit and you then want to scale it across the enterprise, the cost can go much higher really quickly. It's not something you'd easily scale from a licensing perspective without significant additional budget increases. Scope it accordingly, because licensing can become an issue.

Also, look at your certificate authority because one of the things we did was go with another certificate authority, not believing that the Axiad solution would be sufficient. We ended up paying for another vendor to provide the CA capabilities when we could have gotten that as part of the package from Axiad. Do some analysis on the things that you already have and see what you could eliminate, things that Axiad, as a package, is going to provide. It may end up saving you money. That's the one mistake we made because we had already signed contracts with the other vendor. At the time, either Axiad didn't explain this aspect well enough or we didn't understand that they were offering CA as part of the package, so we missed out on that.

For the one use case that we specifically wanted to solve for that one business unit, it has performed perfectly. I haven't seen anything that I do not like. During presales, they said it was going to do this specific functionality and, when they deployed it, it did exactly what they said it was going to do. You rarely see that nowadays where you get a capability and you don't have to play around to make it work the way you want it to. But that wasn't the case with Axiad Cloud.