London Fire Brigade Deploys Courion to Serve Firefighters and Support Staff in World’s Third Largest Fire Service

LONDON, August 23, 2011 -

- Courion solution eliminates increasing volumes of helpdesk requests with automated password retrieval

Courion Corporation, the leading provider of Access Risk Management solutions that help organisations cost effectively deal with identity and access compliance and security risk, today announced that London Fire Brigade, the UK’s largest fire service and one of the world’s largest metropolitan services, has implemented its Access Assurance Suite™ solution to automate password management and enforce consistent password policy for its 7,000 full-time firefighters and support staff. Using Courion, London Fire Brigade has slashed the volume of calls to its IT Service Desk at shift changes, significantly reducing the overhead costs of password resets.

“To provide round-the-clock service, we operate a two-shift, four-watch system at stations. Firefighters that don’t access their accounts on a daily basis often forget their passwords, which historically caused a huge volume of calls being logged with the service desk at each change of watch,” said Sally Devine, head of ICT contracts and support services at London Fire Brigade. “This placed unnecessary pressures on the service desk team, making it increasingly difficult for them to achieve the required SLAs in relation to other ICT services.”

The London Fire Brigade’s ICT team saw an opportunity to remedy the problem of excessive helpdesk calls to retrieve passwords during an operating system upgrade. With Courion’s solution in place, the Brigade’s Service Desk has seen a dramatic fall in calls requesting password resets; 5,016 staff, making up 73 per cent of all user accounts, have performed 8,288 successful password resets using Courion’s solution. The Service Desk in the same period has taken 4,903 calls to request password resets.

“We evaluated several products, and Courion’s solution became the clear leader as the product that best met our requirements,” said Devine. “We made the decision quickly, and implementation was extremely straightforward.”

London Fire Brigade is the only fire service in the United Kingdom to employ only full-time firefighters and serves an area of 620 square miles incorporating all known types of fire risk from high risk, densely-populated inner city areas to suburban locations.

The Brigade - which has two data centres in Greenwich View Place and Wapping − operates a thin client, Microsoft and Citrix-based environment in a multi-user, multi-server setup. Whilst it makes heavy use of Microsoft Active Directory to set permissions and group policy, it also uses a number of bespoke applications.

The benefits granted by Courion’s solution are three-fold: it provides increased user productivity, improves risk management, and reduces costs. The solution enables tighter security and better compliance with company policy and industry regulations by giving end users the ability to reset and synchronise passwords themselves whilst enforcing password policies. This self-service password management capability can be used across a wide variety of enterprise systems.

“Clearly, the London Fire Brigade has an important responsibility; any process that impedes their main function of saving lives needs to be reduced to a bare minimum,” explains Marc Lee, EMEA Sales Director at Courion. “Using Courion, London Fire Brigade has managed to reduce the volume of calls to its IT helpdesk significantly - Courion’s solution has handled over 8,000 jobs that would otherwise have been manually processed by helpdesk staff. In so doing, it is also improving security and encouraging better password management.”

Courion’s unique approach to identity, access and compliance management ensures that only the right people have the right access to the right resources and are doing the right things. Access Assurance unifies Access Governance, Access Compliance and Access Provisioning in the most complex, heterogeneous environments. This comprehensive approach increases operational efficiency and transparency, strengthens security, and improves compliance, while delivering the industry’s fastest time to value and lowest total cost of ownership.

About Courion

Courion’s award-winning Access Assurance Suite solutions are used by nearly 500 organisations and over 14 million users worldwide to quickly and easily solve their most complex identity and access management (password management, provisioning, and role management), risk and compliance challenges. Courion’s business-driven approach results in unparalleled customer success by ensuring users’ access rights and activities are compliant with policy while supporting both security and business objectives.  For more information, please visit our website at www.courion.com, our blog at blog.courion.com, or on Twitter at twitter.com/Courion.

To view this release online, go to:  www.courion.com/company/press_release.html?id=959

Courion is a registered trademark of Courion Corporation. Access Assurance Suite is a trademark of Courion Corporation. All rights reserved. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Rachel Weeks, Courion Corporation, +1-508-661-0467; or Michelle Dillon, Beaupre, +1-603-559-5835, mdillon at beaupre.com