London Fire Brigade deploys access management system

The London Fire Brigade (LFB) has deployed a new password and access management system for its 7,000 fire fighters and support staff.

The solution, from access risk management provider Courion, will automate password management and enforce consistent password policy for the LFB, the UK's largest fire service.

Sally Devine, head of ICT contracts and support services at LFB, said that the organisation has previously suffered a history of password management problems leading to a large volume of support calls.

"Firefighters who don't access their accounts on a daily basis often forget their passwords, which historically caused a huge volume of calls being logged with the service desk.

"This placed unnecessary pressures on the service desk team, making it increasingly difficult for them to achieve the required SLAs in relation to other ICT services."

The LFB decided to implement Courion's solution during an operating system upgrade, and has seen a decrease in the volume of support calls since.

Since the solution was implemented, 5,016 staff, which is 73 per cent of all user accounts, have performed 8,288 successful password resets using Courion's solution. The LFB's service desk in the same period has taken 4,903 calls to request password resets.

The LFB, which operates two datacentres in Greenwich and Wapping, uses a thin client, Microsoft and Citrix-based environment in a multi-user, multi-server setup. It uses a combination of Microsoft Active Directory and several bespoke applications to set access permissions and group policy.