Introduction
A major multinational company with activities in Greece approached us for an update to its identity and access management (IAM) systems and policies.
Given the client’s highly competitive industry, extensive workforce, and operation across several offices and locales, identity access management is key to the efficiency of processes and the ability to serve their customers swiftly and to a high standard.
Initial consultation with the client helped both sides identify clear, measurable goals that included better productivity, improved customer satisfaction, minimized risks and compliance with several sets of regulations and mandates.
Following that, Accutech’s team took the time to study and assess the client’s existing environment, together with the challenges and particularities it presented and potential pain points in planning and implementation. Characteristically complex and distributed for a company of this size, the existing infrastructure featured widely used applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and active directory (AD) software, as well as several types of custom-built and legacy applications. To be efficient and truly holistic, a fully integrated and automated IAM solution ought to be connected to all these. Consequently, this was set as a priority.
Challenge
The client’s brief included multiple points to be addressed.
Accutech was tasked with using its expertise for:
- Review of business roles, merging and updated as needed, to align with business needs
- User identity management, including review of policies and procedures, for increased security
- Centralization, standardization and automation of user provisioning functions in line with current and future organizational needs – for instance, reducing onboarding time from two to three weeks, to half a day
- Reducing administrative and operational costs related to user identity lifecycle management
- Adoption and implementation of industry best practices in IAM
- Provision of effective auditing and reporting of accurate data
- Minimizing security risks by deploying effective controls and eliminating errors
- Achieving compliance with internal and external regulations, laws and guidelines
Solution
In close collaboration with the client, Accutech’s team of experts was able to evaluate, assess and fully meet these challenges by making use of state of the art identity management tools combined with its experience and knowhow.
The solution designed and implemented for this multinational client provided robust identity administration covering the full gamut of target systems across the identity lifecycle.
Provisioning and user self-service functionality for the management of all types of identities significantly improved task completion and user satisfaction. Security and compliance requirements were met by automating and streaming every process related to adding, changing, deleting and validating user identity information and granting access privileges.
Built on a role-based access control strategy and implementing industry best practices such as zero trust policies, the solution integrates proactive enforcement of business and compliance rules. For instance, by segregating duties during provisioning, it enables the detection and prevention of user access violations before they occur.
Outcome
Within less than a year, Accutech’s solution fully met the client’s needs. With a cutting-edge identity access management solution in place, personnel was able to work more productively, efficiently and with less risk.
Offered up by the new system in place, process analysis and metrics showed a total productivity increase of 68% within the first year of deployment and operation.
More specifically, the objectives laid out by the client were met, with provable results.
- Regulatory compliance: A number of industry and government-mandated regulations for protecting access to data were met. Further, the solution fully aligned with the company’s internal security requirements by providing a consolidated view of user access rights, automated provisioning, de-provisioning and workflow approval processes, and preventive policy violation detection and remediation.
- Enhanced efficiency of operations: Productivity improvements were observed for employees, management as well as the IT department, thanks to automated provisioning, approval and compliance workflows.
- Cost improvements: Automation and new workflows reduced IT administration costs by 58%. In fact, the full return-on-investment goal was set to three years by the client, but was achieved in just 16 months.
- Reduced security risks: By appropriately and consistently provisioning access rights and privileges to users based on a predefined set of policies and rules, unnecessary access privileges are not accumulated over time, while orphaned accounts are eliminated through streamlined de-provisioning. This means improved security – especially protection from those seeking to gain access to the client’s systems.
