Fortune 50 insurance company reduces risk exposure and costs

This organization is one of the largest health insurance providers in the United States. From providing Medicare Advantage services to over 4.5 million seniors to the delivery of home health services, provider services, and other healthcare products and services, the company serves millions of people.

Even with revenues of over $92 billion in 2022, the company continues to expand through organic means and acquisitions. With average growth numbers that outpaced its competitors and an expected 17% growth in Medicare Advantage members in 2023, a key driver for the company is finding ways to efficiently deliver its services and easily integrate everything from new employees to new acquisitions.

While the corporate numbers are impressive, the organization remains focused on helping its clients proactively manage healthcare to minimize costs and obtain improved health outcomes. The company is dedicated to improving the health of every person it serves.

To do that well, a few years ago, the company recognized that it needed to empower its employees to deliver on their business objectives efficiently while managing regulatory compliance better and finding ways to lower costs. In addition, the company’s rapid growth, both organically and through acquisition, highlighted the need to reduce risk exposure related to access controls and keep costs down.

“If you can reduce the number of approvals you need, the amount of manual provisioning that you’re having to do, and get to a much faster time to market, you’re going to do nothing but drive cost out of the equation,” said the Director of Identity and Access Management, Major US health insurer.

Facing down multiple challenges

In such a large, fast-growing company as this customer, driving down costs, creating efficient processes, meeting regulatory requirements, and being able to move at the speed of business can be challenging.

To help it achieve those objectives, the business recognized that it needed to deploy more automated identity security capabilities. Specifically, the company started by deciding to simplify the process for requesting access and onboarding employees, with the goal of empowering them to be successful in their jobs on day one and facilitating regulatory compliance.

The enterprise strategy was to transition millions of unique entitlements assigned to thousands of users to a role-based access environment using SailPoint. By defining users by their roles, the process of assigning access control can be as simple as assigning a role to a user.

The roles drive the automated provisioning and can enforce the principle of minimum necessary access privileges. Roles also let IT and business “speak the same language”, so the overall access control environment is consistent and clear.

Beyond the importance of role-based access for streamlining and simplifying identity management, the company’s recent growth has also increased the importance of two key challenges related to identity security: driving cost efficiency and reducing risk exposure.

In addition to its traditional, insurance-oriented lines of business, the enterprise has been investing heavily in its healthcare business, including acquisitions in areas like home health services, clinical services, pharmacy operations, and more. However, that type of expansion increases security risks since users, IT systems, and data all must be integrated with the organization’s systems.

“Being able to bring an acquired entity into our organization rapidly and transparently is critical for us,” said the Director of Identity and Access Management. “But we must ensure that when doing it, we’re addressing key risk exposures and driving down unit costs.

Role-based access engineering powered by SailPoint solves multiple problems

The company has been at the forefront of effectively and efficiently deploying role-based engineering across tens of thousands of users.

This customer selected SailPoint IdentityIQ for on-premises deployment and successfully used it to re-engineer how the company manages user access across its systems. The company rolled out a phased approach to achieve role-based access control. Over the past years, they have taken this program from a pilot to developing role engineering and certification processes to achieving 100% access profiles across their environment for 2,700 business roles and 55,000 users. The system automates actions across 36 different applications and platforms within the company.

The Identity and Access Management team has worked closely with SailPoint, arranging multiple executive briefings to discuss products and future services. “We found the SailPoint product team to be extremely responsive to hearing our experience with their product and incorporating it as meaningful new feature requests. To me, that speaks to our level of partnership,” said the Director of Identity and Access Management.

The business benefits of automated access management

It didn’t take long for SailPoint to prove its value to this organization. “With SailPoint, we’ve seen a significant reduction in unit cost per joiner, mover, leaver, and ‘ticket cost’ for our Access Catalog.”

The solution has significantly impacted automating the onboarding of new resources, which is critical between September and January when the company is staffing up. With SailPoint, the onboarding process is automated end-to-end and can happen instantaneously without human intervention.

In addition, the SailPoint solution provided the business with a range of other benefits, including:

• better managed regulatory compliances
• streamlining operational processes
• enabling an exceptional customer experience
• moving at the pace of the business

“We’re subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, SOC 1 and SOC 2 audits, and various regulatory compliance audits, so SailPoint is absolutely crucial to our compliance efforts,” said the Director of Identity and Access Management.

Perhaps the most impressive metrics from the SailPoint deployment are just the volume of automated access control requests the system can handle.

Cloud-based SailPoint Identity Security for future growth

As a result of their strong partnership with SailPoint and the success they have achieved with the on-premises strategy, the customer decided to migrate their program to the cloud with SailPoint’s SaaS-based solution, IdentityNow

Several key factors informed the company’s decision to move its identity security platform to the cloud. “There’s a significant business cost reduction associated with moving to the cloud. We also liked the maturity of the SailPoint cloud platform and their roadmap for adding new capabilities.” said the Director of Identity and Access Management.

Being able to take advantage of new capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) was very compelling for this customer. “We recognize that cloud environments excel at big data. That’s why we wanted to leverage new cloud-oriented capabilities like AI and ML with SailPoint.”

The company plans to leverage SailPoint AI and ML capabilities by defining different use cases. For example, using pattern recognition to pilot the assignment of access to a joiner or mover based on who they are, not on what they’ve requested. “We’re getting some excellent results from that. That’s important from a time-to-market perspective, but we’ve also found that the machine does a better job of picking the right access compared to human beings,” said the Director of Identity and Access Management.

Another use case for AI and machine learning is outlier recognition. “We’re looking to bring together account and assignment entitlement data with event data and being able to correlate that,” said the Director of Identity and Access Management. “For example, if someone has been granted access to a privileged account but not accessed it in six months, it might create risk exposure.

An additional advantage of moving to cloud-based identity security is the exposure of the SailPoint data model to company’s BI tools, allowing it to pull out performance metrics and data in real-time for closer monitoring and reporting.

New growth with reduced costs and more efficiency

Although it’s a large Fortune 50 company, this business isn’t just insurance—it’s people. Its tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers are critical to its long-term success.

To best help its customers improve their health, the company must be efficient. With SailPoint Identity Security, it can now leverage new cloud-based capabilities like AI and machine learning to reduce risk exposure, streamline processes and make its employees more effective, reduce costs, manage compliance, and support continued growth.