[Customer Story] Collin County, Texas, Uses Pathlock’s MFA Solution To Improve PeopleSoft Security

Collin County, like all counties in Texas, is considered an extension of state government. Located just north of Dallas, Collin County (the County) provides various government services to its more than 1,000,000 residents. The County’s security team is responsible for enabling secure yet convenient access to appropriate information and services for their on-premise installation of PeopleSoft. Unfortunately, as is often the case with legacy, on-premise PeopleSoft installations, convenient access can lead to security gaps.

What Challenges Made Collin County Search for A PeopleSoft MFA Solution?

The security team at Collin County was observing vulnerabilities in their network regarding potentially unknown people accessing bank account routing numbers. These security gaps made their network prone to phishing attacks by external hackers who could access their network through compromised employee credentials. The attackers also could change the bank account numbers on the direct deposit page so that every time the payroll ran, they could deposit the employee paychecks into offshore accounts. Collin County wanted to improve their PeopleSoft data security posture and reached out to Pathlock Security to equip them with an MFA solution that could seamlessly integrate into their existing applications without additional servers or customizations.

Collin County Plugged Their Security Gaps with an Adaptive MFA Solution

Following a strategic decision by their Chief Information Security Officer to strengthen data security and protect their network from phishing attacks, the IT leaders at Collin County set out to upgrade and modernize their HCM applications with advanced features to improve data security and block external threats. Using the Pathlock Security Platform (ASP), they deployed multi-factor authentication along with logging & analytics to achieve the desired results.

Pathlock’s adaptive MFA solution seamlessly integrated with Collin County’s HCM applications without causing additional friction for the users. The County deployed multi-factor authentication to challenge users to reconfirm identity at the page/component level and secured administrative access to PeopleSoft by requiring MFA from everywhere, including in-house. They also secured remote access for banking transactions and improved employees’ payroll data security by successfully detecting and blocking external threats. In addition to multi-factor authentication, Collin County was able to secure sensitive information and PII in nonproduction environments, such as dev, test, and train, by leveraging ASP’s data masking functionality.

End-to-End PeopleSoft Data Security and Compliance with the Pathlock Security Platform

Pathlock’s PeopleSoft customer base includes multiple state governments and local municipalities, like Collin County, looking for a single platform to strengthen Identity and Access Management, Data Security, and Compliance, including:

• Native SAML/ADFS Compatibility And PeopleSoft MFA Integration– Integrating single sign-on and multi-factor authentication natively with PeopleSoft and your identity provider improves security and convenience. Integrated MFA also enables step-up authentication, so users can be forced to re-authenticate when accessing highly sensitive transactions.
• Contextual Access Control For Greater Security – Reduce the attack surface with a dynamic rules engine that applies the contextual variables of a user’s access and defines privileges in real time. Implement least privilege to limit access to modules/transactions, dynamically mask sensitive data, enforce step-up MFA, and more.
• Real-Time Analytics For Improved Response Times – Enhanced PeopleSoft logging capabilities capture all user activity at the field, page, and component levels and combine them with contextual user data. Real-time visualized dashboards allow you to quickly spot suspicious activity and drill down to root out issues.

Contact Pathlock’s PeopleSoft experts today to learn how the Pathlock Security Platform can help you establish an MFA solution and a strong ERP data security posture.