WWF (World Wild Fund for Nature) is the world’s leading independent conservation organization with a mission to create a world where people live in harmony with nature.

With operations reaching across almost 100 countries, WWF-International provides several global IT services which complement the IT provision operated locally by individual offices.

Global services provided by WWF-International include global intranet, Zoom, Google Apps, conservation applications and a variety of collaboration services. Currently, in order to access WWF services, users must use a different username and password at the international and local levels. This leads to increased helpdesk calls to assist end users with managing their credentials – for example, to perform password resets − which leads to a poor user experience and reduced uptake of services and collaboration.

The picture is further complicated by IT services being provided and consumed globally. The result of this is yet more usernames and passwords for end users to manage, as well as increased security and identity governance risks due to the large number of identity repositories to keep track of.

WWF was looking for a solution to provide a slick, intuitive experience for its users whilst enhancing security around application access.

Advised by ProofID’s IAM Architecture team, WWF-International selected PingFederate to provide secure, standards-based, federated single sign-on across all of its global IT services, providing a ‘single pane of glass’ for its end users, whatever their location. Deployed as a managed solution in the ProofID cloud, the service provides a highly resilient authentication service for WWF without dependence on any single country or region.

A key benefit of PingFederate was its flexible deployment options, allowing users to authenticate against their local authentication source – typically Active Directory in their ‘home’ office – to access global applications and services, without the need for WWF to manage a separate ‘global’ identity and credentials for each user.

Deploying PingFederate in this way has made it possible for WWF to provide a single authentication source no matter where the user is located, be that in the US, Uganda or Uruguay, significantly reducing the complexity inherent in large distributed organizations like WWF.

Users are now able to access WWF-International IT services using the same username and password as they use to log on to applications in their local office. This has significantly reduced the number of credentials maintained within the organization, leading to major improvements in the user experience while significantly reducing onboarding time and the potential for confusion for new users.

Alongside these productivity benefits, the security profile of the organization has also been improved. The solution has been so successful that individual offices have now started to build upon the platform to secure their own applications and services, both within and across regions.