How Freddie Mac Overhauled Workforce Identity and Access Management

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, better known as Freddie Mac, is the backbone of the United States housing sector. Founded over 50 years ago, Freddie Mac has been on a mission to bring liquidity, stability, and affordability to the U.S. housing market. During that time, it’s provided more than $10 trillion to help over 78 million people finance their homes.

As Freddie Mac began to embrace digital channels, the need to modernize its legacy web access management (WAM) infrastructure was imperative. The system was nearing end-of-life and the team was plagued by serious security vulnerabilities that they could only resolve with a lengthy and costly upgrade. Moving to a modern identity and access management (IAM) platform would be a massive undertaking, with 400+ apps in the project scope.

Despite the daunting project ahead of them, the team was determined to move forward. Their existing solution lacked critical capabilities that were holding the business back. Here were the major issues:

Support Current Standards

A lack of support for modern authentication protocols like OAuth and OIDC made it difficult or impossible to integrate new services, causing frustration for both business and IT stakeholders.

Deliver a Better Employee Experience

Without global single sign-on (SSO), IT teams and employees were wasting precious hours switching between portals and manually resetting passwords, hurting productivity throughout the business.

Close Security Gaps

A security audit revealed vulnerabilities that Freddie Mac’s previous vendor was struggling to remediate. As a public entity, the organization needed to mitigate this risk as quickly as possible.

While updating an identity platform might be the right move, it’s rarely straightforward or easy. Identity infrastructure underpins all of your enterprise apps, including business-critical processes. Thus, careful planning is required.

Teams often hesitate to commit to the decision, and continue to use tools they resent. But there is a path forward—and the identity team at Freddie Mac used a three-step process to make it happen:

1. Build Internal Support

Workforce identity transformation affects the entire organization, so building internal support is vital. The identity team at Freddie Mac reached out to decision-makers throughout the business to raise awareness of the current and potential issues and outlined their plan to mitigate the risks. Getting everyone’s buy-in created momentum to switch to a new platform.

2. Research IAM Vendors

Rather than approaching vendors directly, Freddie Mac performed its own internal research and assessment of workforce identity solutions in the market—using reviews and analyst reports from Gartner and Forrester to get an unbiased overview of the top players.

3. Conduct a Proof of Concept

Finally, Freddie Mac invited a selected group of vendors to participate in a proof of concept (POC)—leveling the playing field by creating a common set of criteria that a solution must meet. The team used the POC to test requirements unique to their use case, emphasizing authentication, authorization, standards, and scalability.

The POC led the Freddie Mac identity team to select a joint workforce identity solution from Ping Identity and SailPoint. While technology was a key factor, the decision ultimately came down to selecting the solution that would give them the best chance for success during the initial migration and implementation. Also, since Ping and SailPoint both have broad support for open standards, Freddie Mac felt good about the long-term benefits.

Alongside in-house expertise from Ping and SailPoint, Freddie Mac enlisted an implementation partner—LikeMinds—to support the migration and deployment of their new identity infrastructure. So far, the combined team has:

• Migrated more than 400 applications.

• Deployed SSO for cloud and mobile devices.

• Used mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA) to strengthen security.

• Consolidated on a single digital identity for all workforce users.

• Enabled business-to-business federation capabilities.

• Delivered a better user experience.

Recognizing the success of this large-scale workforce identity transformation project, Ping awarded Freddie Mac the title of Modern Identity Champion at its 2020 Identity Excellence Awards. The Freddie Mac team also recently joined Ping, Sailpoint, and LikeMinds for a webinar to share their complete story. Watch the webinar replay to get their perspective on migrating from legacy WAM to a modern workforce identity solution.

For more information on how to keep your workforce secure and productive with modern identity capabilities, we have provided solution packages within PingOne for Workforce. These packages allow organizations of all sizes to easily create, design, and implement identity workflows. If a large organization like Freddie Mac can do it, so can you!