Northern California City Adopts PhoneFactor to Provide Two-Factor Authentication for Their Remote Access VPN

The Business Challenge:

Small and mid-sized cities have been targets of hackers due to tight municipal budgets and limited IT staff. The City of Roseville, California has 1,200 employees and sought new technology to reduce costs while providing strong security for accessing the city’s mission-critical data and applications remotely.

While security was a high priority, the city was also looking for a solution that could be implemented and managed without putting a strain on their limited IT support resources. PhoneFactor’s low cost and high level of security make it an ideal solution for securing authorized access to the city’s VPN or other critical applications.

The Solution:

“The challenge with software or hardware tokens is logistics – inventory and distribution, especially to vendor support staff that could be located anywhere,” said David Applebaum, telecommunications manager, City of Roseville. “With PhoneFactor, we’ve eliminated the need to buy and manage tokens, and our employees use their own phones to access the city’s VPN. PhoneFactor solves our multi-factor authentication challenge with simplicity and value while providing significantly stronger security for the city’s VPN.”PhoneFactor is a phone-based two-factor system that eliminates the need for expensive tokens, card readers, and other devices. It works with any phone (land line or mobile). It can be installed, configured, and managed in minutes. There is no concern about token expiration or synchronization; no smartcards to renew; nor any drivers or devices to manage.

No changes are required to user interfaces and no software needs to be downloaded to the phone. It seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Domain and RADIUS as primary authentication technology, and users can easily be set up through a simple active directory import, or on an individual basis.

Everything can be included to roll out a complete authentication service including plug-ins for VPN appliances, Citrix Access, Outlook Web Access, web applications and most other standard applications. In addition, PhoneFactor offers key security features not available from other two factor authentication systems, like Live Fraud Alerts. PhoneFactor is the only two-factor authentication that allows for instant attack detection and proactive notification of the end-user in an attack occurs. The end-user has the ability to instantly notify the appropriate personnel with the touch of a button on the phone.