Fortune 50 technology company moves to SaaS and AI

With over 165,000 employees worldwide, this Fortune 50 Technology Company has a clear imperative to ensure its employees can easily access the network and applications they need to deliver continued growth and success for the company in a secure and compliant manner. Likewise, they place a premium on user experience throughout their ecosystem – including employees, partners, vendors, and customers – all of which requires a robust identity and access management (IAM) program.

Yet over time, several factors made it increasingly difficult to manage identity governance and administration, according to the Director of Identity Governance and Administration at this Fortune 50 Technology Company.

“One of the biggest drivers for modernizing identity governance stemmed from our transition to a hybrid and multi-cloud environment, and the subsequent need to govern identities consistently across the heterogeneous IT landscape from a single pane of glass. Additionally, on-premises administration of IGA capabilities has become a challenge due to administrative overheads like periodic upgrades, patching, and vulnerability management.”

While they traditionally relied upon several compliance and access tools, their lack of a centralized and modern IGA platform was diminishing the overall effectiveness and efficiency of their identity security program. Specifically, the Director of IGA says his team needed a single solution that automated use cases such as detection of separation of duty violations and role-based access control, as well as modern tools like artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify and improve user experience.

“We needed to manage and govern identities, a task traditionally done using on-premises resources,” the Director of IGA said. “But those environments need constant monitoring and upkeep like patching, upgrades and vulnerability management – all of which require a great deal of administrative overhead that takes time away from what we should be focusing on, which is improving identity governance capabilities and user experience.”

Down the road

To address these challenges, the Director of IGA and his team developed a roadmap that puts identity security at the center, with a single platform to seamlessly manage access controls across their hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

“A major component of the roadmap was the ability to manage who has access to what across the enterprise, with the goal of ensuring that only the right users have access to the right assets at the right time,” the Director of IGA said. “We envisioned a sort of transparent magic tool that would just run and make sure that each employee had the right level of accesses needed to meet responsibilities – nothing more, nothing less. Also, that access was only allowed to continue if the employee was truly using that functionality – something we call ‘use it or lose it.’ Then any unused access would be removed.”

The next step was vendor evaluation, through which the Director’s team analyzed 150 criteria to identify its top five IAM vendor prospects. The vendors were ranked in a quantitative manner using a proprietary framework from Deloitte, which enabled the team to identify its top two prospects – one of which was SailPoint.

For the past year, this Fortune 50 Technology company has been using SailPoint’s IdentityNow platform and AI-Driven Identity Security capabilities. Most of the company’s focus has been on driving adoption on the IdentityNow platform. Ultimately, the Director of IGA says, several factors contributed to the team choosing SailPoint.

“Speed of integration was the number one thing, quickly followed by user experience, which is a major highlight of SailPoint,” he said. “Our customers demand a consumer-like user experience in the workplace, which drives employee satisfaction. A good example is access review fatigue due to recurring access reviews. But SailPoint simplifies the process using an AI-based recommendation engine based on the data that the system already knows to determine if it's safe to approve certain accesses. That is a major improvement to user experience for our end users.”

The Director said integration with SailPoint was simple and enabled his team to develop new strategies for IGA requirements.

“For instance, we used our enterprise ServiceNow as the common front end for access requests, because users already go to ServiceNow for requesting various resources,” he said. “We decided to put access requests there, as well, so users have one less tool to learn. We also have benefited tremendously from SailPoint’s connectors because the vast nature of our enterprise requires the use of hundreds of software as a service (SaaS) tools. We’ve found that for many of those solutions, SailPoint has out-of-the box connectors. When there isn’t an available connector, SailPoint provides a generic API connector that’s easy to use. Meanwhile, we can see that the library of connectors grows every day, and more are coming.”

Early successes

While the team has been using SailPoint for less than a year, they’ve already seen quantifiable results from the platform.

“For this year, we set a target of fully onboarding a large number of applications, which was higher than we ever did using other technologies in the past. This included managing the entire Joiner-Mover-Leaver identity lifecycle,” he said. “By using the out of the box connectors and simple configuration approach of SailPoint, we achieved our target goal for the entire year by the third quarter. In fact, we’re on target to achieve double that goal by the end of the year.”

The Director of IGA believes SailPoint is able to deliver such results because its solutions are cloud native, as opposed to many other alternative solutions on the market that modify legacy on-premises solutions to run in a cloud environment.

“In a very short amount of time, we were able to onboard a large number of applications,” he said. “We’ve been using many of the platform’s capabilities with success, including tracking separation of duties. While there were some challenges during the integration, especially in accommodating some of the legacy business processes, the professional services team helped us resolve them quickly.”

For the future, the Director says with the ever-increasing focus on Identity Security, the technology company views its relationship with SailPoint as a partnership. They have also positioned SailPoint as a key part of their Cybersecurity toolset for managing Insider Risk.

“We’re all part of this cyber security technology ecosystem,” he said, “and it’s much more than a buyer-vendor type of relationship. As SailPoint grows and adds new features and functionality, we expect to grow right along with it.”