How Collin County, Texas Improved PeopleSoft Data Security With Appsian’s MFA Integration

Executive Summary

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 PeopleSoft infrastructure. The objective was to equip their HCM applications with advanced features to improve network security and block external threats. Using Appsian’s Application Security Platform (ASP), they deployed Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and logging & analytics to achieve the desired results.

Challenges

The security team at Collin County had observed potential 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 every time the payroll ran, they could deposit the employee paychecks into offshore accounts.

Solution

Collin County successfully modernized its PeopleSoft infrastructure by implementing ASP’s MFA and logging and analytics capabilities. Appsian’s MFA solution turned out to be extremely user-friendly, seamlessly integrating into Collin County’s HCM applications without causing additional friction for the users.

Results

Collin County deployed MFA to challenge users to reconfirm identity at the page/component level. They secured administrative access to PeopleSoft on a technical level 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 MFA, Collin County was able to secure sensitive information (PII) in nonproduction environments, such as dev, test, and train, by leveraging ASP’s data masking functionality.