Europe-500 retailer solved immediate challenges with identity security

Jewelry is a very personal product. This European retailer recognized this a long time ago, with its hand-finished, customizable Jewelry offerings, and with that insight turned itself into one of the largest Jewelry companies in the world, with over 27,000 employees worldwide. After over forty years, the company continues to produce its own jewelry and sells it through thousands of company-owned stores and franchises, generating ongoing success and a steady stream of new customers.

In fact, with continued expectations of solid growth in the years to come the company plans on adding a significant number of new employees—as many as 10,000 in the next few years to support consumers’ desire for its Jewelry.

But to succeed on that kind of phenomenal growth path, the company realized it need to find ways to automate its existing processes, eliminate security risks, and enable more personalized communication with its employees, partners, and users.

To do so, they took a note from the personalized nature of its business. It decided to personalize access to its IT networks, systems, data, and applications by deploying an identity management solution that could automatically manage individual identities of its users. The company realized that identifying and automatically managing the wide range of identities involved with design, manufacturing, and sales processes was a critical path for company’s future growth and expansion.

Every step of their business process is digitized and that means having accurate information on who’s accessing what, and when, is critical. The company also recognized that it needed to securely and confidently maintain communication with a range of internal and external stakeholders, from individual artisans crafting products to salespeople staffing a franchised sales location, and it needed identity management to do that.

“Identity management is very much core to being an efficient company these days,” said Director of Cyber Resilience.

Challenges and change

The company knew that it needed a better approach to identity security when internal audits confirmed that some of its users were over provisioned and had access to systems or applications that weren’t necessary. It also wanted to reduce reliance on manual identity management and access processes by investing in an automation.

The company realized its manual processes for giving employees access to systems and applications wasn’t working well enough. For example, access wasn’t necessarily removed when employees left or changed positions, and each process relied on people to remember to take the appropriate steps. It was too manual and was consuming significant resources from the organization’s help desk.

More importantly, with plans to grow by 10,000 employees in next few years, the company knew it needed a way to make its onboarding process more efficient and secure.

To solve its identity and access management challenges, the organisation turned to SailPoint SaaS solution.

“It was easier than I thought to get the foundational components up and running,” said Director of Cyber Resilience. “And it’s been quite easy to get most of the integrations up and running as well. I think it’s a great product.”

One of the first areas the company was seeking to improve with its identity management solution was focused on its manufacturing center in Asia. Previously, it typically took two weeks to onboard new employees, doing health checks, filling out forms, and giving them access. But after deploying identity management for the onboarding process, things changed--dramatically.

Identity management pays off

For this retailer, the investment in SailPoint has already paid off. “We expect to save somewhere between $440k to $1 million in 2023, depending on how many people we hire,” said Director of Cyber Resilience. “Over the next five years we estimate we’ll save an additional $4.4 million.”

Taking just the savings from the improved employee onboarding process, SailPoint solution has provided this retailer with a minimum of a 4-times return on its initial commitment to the product.

In addition to saving a week’s worth of idle time for each new joiner, the new solution has also removed manual work and resource load from the company’s service desk. It’s resolved some of the IT audit findings and compliance issues and it has improved security through verifiable identity automation.

“Our experience with SailPoint has generally been very good,” said Director of Cyber Resilience. “We’ve cleaned up our data and now can build a foundation for all of this, along with network segmentation, zero trust, and the future of our systems. Future success for any company these days requires rock solid identity security.”

Better communication

“Identity security started as a way for us to gain full control over who has access to what, but it turned out to be an enabler for a lot more important things for the company,” said Director of Cyber Resilience.

For example, one challenge the company had experienced over the years was finding ways to get consistent information to employees in all its stores, both company-owned stores and independent franchises, since some employees didn’t have corporate email addresses. Now, SailPoint’s solution has provided a way for the retailer to create secure identities for its internal and external employees and salespeople, enabling secure communication of direct corporate communications from top management to the company’s frontline staff who are connecting with customers every day.

“Our SailPoint-based identity solution is enabling our CEO and corporate management to communicate securely and directly with all our salespeople and frontline workers in ways that were never possible before,” said Director of Cyber Resilience. “It’s been a key problem for us to solve, and automation is helping us to do that. And that makes our CEO very happy!”

Of course, saving money is great. But this deployment also provides other benefits—specifically it’s helping the company to reduce risk, by eliminating error-prone manual processes and ensuring consistent access (or denial of access) to critical corporate data and systems.

A rock-solid foundation build on identity management

Going forward, the company sees lots of opportunities for applying its new identity capabilities for both saving money and increasing functionality.

“By using automated identity management we’re building a foundation for ourselves and security,” said Director of Cyber Resilience. “You need to have your data in order before you start building on top of it.” The company is also working to implement a recertification process for users so that access controls are current, and implementing native change detection to improve data quality and consistency, so that when changes are made to an account in an application or Microsoft Active Directory it will be synched across other systems.

“Our plan this year is to focus on data quality, making things easier for the service desk, and external users,” said Director of Cyber Resilience.

The new identity management platform will significantly aid in communication with stores and salespeople, which is especially important in company the size of this Europe-500 retailer. With quality user data and clear identities, the group responsible for applications is now able to roll out sales training in targeted ways that it hasn’t been able to before. It can also share sensitive information on upcoming product launches in a secure and effective way.

“That’s really big,” said Director of Cyber Resilience. “It might sound basic, but for them it’s really important and it matters.”

Automated identity security has been a huge success for company. It has not only solved some of their immediate compliance, security, and resource challenges, but it’s opened up new opportunities for them to take advantage of.

“Identity security is such a critical foundational component. It’s not going to shine or draw attention to itself when it works, but if it’s not there, everything falls apart,” said Director of Cyber Resilience.