Repsol Energizes Employees With One-click Cloud Access

The Objective

In line with its strategy of leadership in the energy sector and increasing its international footprint, Repsol needed a secure access solution for its corporate cloud application portfolio. This includes applications related to innovation, as well as professional and corporate social networks. This solution also had to increase ease of use for thousands of employees around the world.

Repsol’s goal was to offer all users–both in Spain and in the field–easy and secure access to corporate applications in the cloud using their corporate credentials, so they no longer had to remember different passwords for each platform. The company wanted a tool that ensured the level of security required by a company like Repsol, with its large global workforce and presence, without sacrificing ease of use.

The Challenge

Repsol’s IT department had tried other solutions, but none was able to meet all needs. The main deficiencies were complex architectures, errors, and lack of support for federation standards. Without a solution in place, employees had to remember different passwords for external platforms that are accessed only occasionally (sometimes after months of absence) and required new credentials to be generated, wasting the user’s time and the support team’s effort. So Repsol decided to start looking for a federation tool, which involved analyzing a number of options that met the requirements of the Kantara Initiative.

The Solution

The IT department chose PingFederate, a full-featured federation server to provide web single sign-on (SSO) for employees. Among the immediate goals were implementing a tool that didn’t require employees to memorize different passwords, ensuring better usability through SSO, and improving security through centralized management of credentials.

One of the main reasons that Repsol chose PingFederate is that it offers a niche, task-oriented solution with a simple architecture and more integration across a greater number of platforms. It also offers a specific service for the cloud and easier deployment than competitor solutions.

Implementing the tool was a fast process. Within three months, Repsol was able to start integrating the various corporate cloud applications, eliminating the need to distribute credentials to third-party systems and enabling all users to use corporate credentials to access the company’s services in the cloud.