The Challenge
A global elevator and escalator manufacturer operating in more than 100 countries needed to secure its company-owned mobile device fleet. The company employs tens of thousands of technicians to service equipment in buildings around the world, and those technicians require devices with secure, reliable network access.
The company’s legacy password-based authentication system posed significant security risk for the operation. It also created administrative overhead at a scale that spanned dozens of manufacturing facilities, field service operations, and corporate offices across multiple continents.
The manufacturer needed a RADIUS solution that could handle more than 20,000 devices across geographically dispersed sites without requiring on-premises servers at every location. An executive mandate to strengthen the company’s security posture accelerated the timeline, requiring a solution that could move beyond password-based RADIUS authentication to certificate-based device security.
The Solution
The deployment evolved across three phases over five years. During the first phase, the company gradually moved from its distributed on-premises RADIUS servers to the SecureW2 cloud-native RADIUS solution. All 20,000+ of the company’s devices could now be centrally managed, a critical feature for the global team.
In phase two, the organization completed the decommissioning of its on-premises servers and expanded its cloud infrastructure to support an additional 12,000 devices.
In the third and final phase, the organization shifted to a certificate-based security solution, implementing the SecureW2 managed PKI. Within weeks, the team had issued more than 10,000 certificates.
The Results
- Successful implementation of secure, certificate-based authentication, replacing the legacy shared password solution
- 20,000+ devices enrolled across the global mobile device fleet
- 10,000+ certificates issued in the first month after PKI enablement
- Full PKI implementation — the manufacturer evolved from cloud RADIUS to a full-scale PKI, providing a scalable, passwordless solution for a global fleet of devices