Teachers Health Defense in Depth with Identity Security
Teachers Health is a not-for-profit organisation that manages a health fund exclusively for the education community. They are Australia’s largest industry-based health fund that provides cost-effective private health insurance to over 350,000 teachers, staff and their families.
Challenge
Teachers Health’s service desk was inundated by calls and tickets that they responded to manually. Onboarding was taking them a minimum of 5-7 days to provision access and the business relied on the IT team for everything.
Solution
Teachers Health turned to SailPoint to address their security and efficiency concerns. By automating lifecycle management and access requests, Teachers Health has gained operational efficiencies and reduced the burden on their IT team. They now have a centralised identity platform in place that enables the business to be self-sufficient and satisfies compliance and audit requirements.
SailPoint is great at what it does. The foundation – lifecycle management and certifications – that is the bread and butter for SailPoint. This is where the power lies.
Sahij Singh, Information Security & Compliance Officer, Teachers Health
>350k
Identities to manage13 weeks
to move Identity to the Cloud2 hours
for granting access from 5-7 days previouslyBalancing compliance while enabling
The finance and insurance industries face strong regulations in Australia and Teachers Health needed to ensure they were covered. In the event of a breach, they would lose their license and the business would be shut down. With more organisations adopting cloud infrastructure, security has become a top priority. Teachers Health was aware of this and created an information security office lead by Dinesh Babu, Head of information Security and Compliance at Teachers Health. Their strategy is rooted in defense in depth, gaining better control and management of access. Teachers Health has always worked hard to maintain compliance and audit requirements for the organisation. Being a small organisation, their IT team was running lean. When an employee began employment, it would take 5-7 days minimum for the employee to receive access and start on time. This lengthy manual process was hindering Teachers Health and slowing them down. Without a centralised and automated solution in place, their IT team was getting bogged down with requests and tickets.
Finding the right partner
Dinesh set out looking for a solution that would improve their security posture, gain operational efficiencies through automation, meet compliance requirements, and impose least privileged access. He started evaluating different vendors with an open mind and did the required due diligence to find the correct solution that would meet their needs. In the end, Teachers Health chose SailPoint as their Identity Security Platform. “SailPoint was ahead of the other vendors with user dashboards and integrations. But for me, I’m more of a people person and the one great differentiator was the customer service and the way SailPoint considered our requirements and provided the right solution,” Dinesh shared. The end user experience and ease of use for internal users to manage access was an important factor in their decision as well.
Moving identity to the cloud
Having a strong partnership to bring this program to life was important for Teachers Health. With the help of their integration partner HappiestMinds and the SailPoint Customer Success team, Teachers Health was able to go live in just 13 weeks. “Without the integrated team, it would have been difficult to implement the solution in a such a short timeframe.” Dinesh said. Having a relationship with SailPoint allowed Teachers Health to have an open line of communication throughout the entire implementation. This open dialogue reassured Teachers Health that the implementation was being done correctly and would lay a solid foundation for future success. “We had all the support from SailPoint to validate the work our integrator was doing and following SailPoint’s best practices,” Dinesh said.
Automation and efficiencies lead to self-sufficiency
SailPoint’s Identity Security Platform was deployed in the cloud and the first order of business was to automate lifecycle management. Before SailPoint, Teachers Health fully relied on the IT team to manually deprovision and provision accounts which was time-consuming and a burden on the team. Now when a new employee is onboarded, access is granted within a couple of hours compared to the 5-7 days it took prior. “Last Friday we needed to onboard five people and by Monday their access had been automatically provisioned. We don’t have to think about that anymore, automation takes care of it.” - Sahij Singh, Information Security and Compliance Officer at Teachers Health. Establishing a self-service request center and automated certification campaigns was their next priority. End users can now request access to applications, further enabling the business to become selfsufficient. “We have gained significant efficiencies after implementing the request center, now people just need to log in once. The Service Desk no longer needs to go into active directory. Everything is now streamlined, and access is provided within a few hours,” Dinesh said. The certification campaigns are now automated and will be rolled out across the organisation soon. “The certifications are simple, and it was a straightforward process even as an admin of the campaigns. It is just simple filters,” Sahij shared.
