Identity and Access Management: Before and After Scenario

Scenario 1: Reduction in Access Management Related Helpdesk Calls

Introduction:

While Identity and Access management (IAM) projects can solve multiple problems, they can also become complex and time consuming. Most organizations struggle with the question, “To deploy or not to deploy”. Is there an ROI? Are there real benefits at the end of the tunnel? These are typical questions most CIOs ask.


Aujas has implemented large IAM projects for clients across industry verticals. In a series of articles, we plan to discuss what benefits a client can expect realistically. We will provide the “Before and After” view by discussing scenarios prior to IAM implementation and scenarios post implementation.


In this first article of the series, we are going to cover the aspect of Helpdesk calls related to access management.

Client Background:

The client is a country arm of a global financial services company with a large user base of over 10,000 and growing. The user base includes internal users, external users and contractors. Additionally, the organization works with more than 50,000 agents. The business operations are supported by over 30 business critical applications that are built on diverse and heterogeneous technology platforms, and managed by different business teams.

Before IAM:

One key problem the client had was of managing user identities across enterprise applications. While there were support teams for each of the application, there were no universal and common procedure followed for user requests to avail application access.


With this approach, although the process for requesting access was defined, the implementation lacked user ID standardization, strong password policies, escalation matrix, audit and compliance reports to name a few.


Users had to remember multiple sets of user IDs and passwords to login to applications. Because of this, there was a huge backlog in helpdesk calls for password reset, unlocking accounts and other such requests.

The Solution:

Aujas successfully implemented a leading IAM suite to address the client requirements. The solution included:

• User Provisioning System: To streamline the business processes by defining a centralized control to manage identity records. The processes to provision access to business applications were refined to leverage the automated system. Access provisioning was aligned with roles and a self-service interface was setup to allow users to request application access and their approvers to grant or reject the request.

• Access Management System: A comprehensive access management system comprising web access management and enterprise Single Sign-on (SSO) was setup. The access management system provided a unified and dynamic portal for users to see and access their currently approved applications. This system allowed users to access the web easily, thick client and terminal based applications in a safe manner without the hassle of remembering different passwords and policies, thereby drastically enhancing user experience. 

After IAM:

Even though the client saw many positive improvements, the biggest benefits were seen in the following two categories:

• Productivity Increase: The key factor in productivity increase stemmed from the reduction in turn-around time for Access Provisioning. The turn-around time reduced from an average of 4 days to less than 15 minutes – a 99% decline.

  This led to an enormous productivity improvement for the client. With an average growth of user base at 30% (3000 employees), the 4 days saved per employee in access provisioning led to tremendous increase in productivity as the client saved over 12,000 man-days of effort annually.

• Cost savings: Reduction in user account management related helpdesk calls from 5500 per month to 500 per month (90% reduction). On an average, a helpdesk call costs $10. Hence, the solution provided savings of $50,000 per month ($600,000 per annum).

  Additionally, the solution provided savings in lost productivity. Earlier the helpdesk received 100 account lockout tickets per day with an average turnaround time of 4 hours. The new solution allowed the client to eliminate almost all account lockout situations (90% reduction). Totally, around 13,000 man-days were saved which would have been wasted otherwise.

Conclusion:

There are definite benefits in terms of automating your access provisioning system. The primary benefits are around productivity increase and cost savings and these are only a few of them. We will cover other benefits like security, risk management and other productivity improvements as we go along in this series.

Author(s):

Mohit Vaish

Practice Head – IAM

Aujas Risk Management Services

Ms. Amitha Raju

Consultant – IAM Practice