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Here is the latest article in an eWEEK feature series called IT Science, in which we look at what actually happens at the intersection of new-gen IT and legacy systems.
Unless it’s brand new and right off various assembly lines, servers, storage and networking inside every IT system can be considered “legacy.” This is because the iteration of both hardware and software products is speeding up all the time. It’s not unusual for an app-maker, for example, to update and/or patch for security purposes an application a few times a month, or even a week. Some apps are updated daily! Hardware moves a little slower, but manufacturing cycles are also speeding up.
These articles describe new-gen industry solutions. The idea is to look at real-world examples of how new-gen IT products and services are making a difference in production each day. Most of them are success stories, but there will also be others about projects that blew up. We’ll have IT integrators, system consultants, analysts and other experts helping us with these as needed.
Today’s Topic: How to Make Enterprise Global Security Seamless
Name the problem to be solved: Rémy Cointreau, the almost 300-year-old family-owned French liquor company, has a globally distributed supply chain with 1,800 users around the world who access more than 50 sites and 200 apps every day. Securing such a large network was a challenge and priority for the company’s IT department and leadership. Rémy had a single sign-on solution, but it was only available in French and suffered from a number of support barriers. Adding new apps through that system was expensive, and more employees needed to access multiple apps through multiple devices daily.
Rémy’s IT team of 50 people needed the flexibility and agility to onboard new employees, troubleshoot issues, and help open new offices and subsidiaries. Rémy also wanted employees to access apps from any device, anywhere, and at any time, so having a mobile management solution was crucial.
Eighty-one percent of data breaches involve compromised credentials, so having robust, low-friction identity measures–such as single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and user behavior analytics–was paramount for Rémy Cointreau.
Describe the strategy that went into finding the solution: Rémy Cointreau moved much of its software and IT to the cloud in 2012, but it had not yet adopted a comprehensive IAM solution. Rémy initiated a search for an identity management solution that would secure application access, simplify user provisioning and the onboarding of new employees, help ease the buildout of new corporate offices and provide a central portal where users could access all the resources they needed from one place. Rémy’s strategic selection of Idaptive was based on increasing company agility, but the solution’s mobility management and multi-factor authentication capabilities would play a key role in reducing costs.
List the key components in the solution:
- Idaptive is the only solution that combines the “table stakes” identity and access management features (SSO, MFA, endpoint and mobile context and UBA) into one comprehensive, cloud-based IAM platform.
- Idaptive’s Next-Gen Access Cloud intelligently verifies and validates users, devices and services across a company’s endpoints, which can help to reduce the workload for the 50 members of Rémy’s IT team. One of the key goals in Rémy’s cloud transformation project was to ensure that users could access anything from a mobile device that they could access from their laptops—in the same easy way.
- The Next-Gen Access Cloud is powered by machine learning, which allows the platform to constantly learn from and adopt to millions of risk signals, leading to an ever-improving product and more secure access.
Describe how the deployment went, how long it took, and if it came off as planned: The deployment happened quite literally overnight. Rémy Cointreau was able to implement the features of the Idaptive Next-Gen Access Cloud immediately and manage user privileges and access while reducing friction on Day 1.
Since implementation, Idaptive has simplified the onboarding of new employees and driven increases in productivity. New employees are productive more quickly after joining the company and easier access has made existing employees more efficient as well. Early on, the company hadn’t planned to move its enterprise mobility management to Idaptive. However, during implementation the team evaluated its functionality and decided to move forward with the consolidated solution.
Describe the result, new efficiencies gained, and what was learned from the project: Since adopting Idaptive as its IAM platform, Rémy has seen extraordinary results:
- Rémy has been able to adopt a true cloud-based IT and security infrastructure. Rémy can control security company-wide (in multiple continents) and build out an identity policy via the cloud. The entire company now has one standardized and simplified solution and set of policies.
- The company has seen a big decrease in IT ticket workload, freeing up IT to focus on larger and more strategic issues. Previously, forgotten passwords, password resets and account lockouts and reactivations were a problem for Rémy IT, responsible for 30 percent of all help-desk tickets. With the industry average cost of a help desk call running anywhere from $25 to $30, these calls not only usurped valuable IT time and negatively impacted productivity, they cost the company real money.
- With one click, Rémy Cointreau can now onboard new employees or revoke access to former employees. This makes hiring, role transitions and departures easier for both HR and IT.
- Before Idaptive, opening a new office was an arduous process from an IT perspective. Back and forth communication and granting access could take weeks or even months for a new office. With the Next-Gen Access Cloud, that becomes solvable with just a few clicks.
Describe ROI, carbon footprint savings, and staff time savings, if any: Rémy has seen clear benefits since switching to Idaptive. It has reduced the burden on IT and significantly lowered costs. Idaptive automatically creates intelligent policies based on login context, freeing IT from defining discrete rules and policies. IT can now more easily manage access for new and existing users, even when they change roles, and accommodates new hires quickly and more securely.
For employees, this means productivity on Day 1: no more wait times to get access to necessary applications and devices. Rémy started with just a few apps in Idaptive, but now has about 200 apps in the portal, used by its subsidiaries in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. A lot of them have local apps that can be integrated with Idaptive. Idaptive brings a global common solution for all these companies, users, and endpoints.
The company is now significantly more flexible. Users are onboarded quickly and productivity has improved. Strain on IT has been removed through simplified provisioning, reduced help desk tickets and a reduced number of products to manage.
Other references:
Introducing Idaptive’s Next-Gen Access Cloud
If you have a suggestion for an eWEEK IT Science article, email cpreimesberger@eweek.com.