Moving from a home-grown to a modern IGA SaaS solution in record time
As part of their digital transformation, DEKRA moved from an in-house developed access management solution to a modern, cloud-based Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution from Omada, which has led to significant productivity improvements, as well as substantial cost savings.
Business Drivers
DEKRA’s digital transformation permeates the entire organization, geared towards driving rapid growth in all areas. However, with growth comes changes in business and cybersecurity requirements, as well as the need to keep the entire workforce productive and efficient. To keep up with these changes, DEKRA needed a modern IGA solution to manage access to all internal resources without compromising the efficiency of administrators and business users.
Challenges before Omada
Prior to Omada, DEKRA had an in-house developed solution for access management that created a lot of inefficiencies. As is the case with many in-house solutions, DEKRA had crafted a tool to solve for a static set of requirements, but as the business changed, the amount of manual effort needed for support made it necessary to evaluate a more modern approach. Further, the ability to enable business users to easily request access was non-existent, and it was similarly difficult for administrators to understand who was requesting access to what. It was also
hard to know who had access to which applications, and how to right-size access throughout the identity lifecycle as employees changed roles, contractors came and went, and day-to-day responsibilities changed hands. DEKRA’s team also had to put in a lot of manual effort to conduct recertifications required to meet various audit and compliance mandates. To maintain their solution, DEKRA had to fully allocate several developer resources to handle all the ongoing customizations, and this was simply not sustainable. Making matters direr despite the full-time resources, the solution was not able to handle access requirements for the various identities across their workforce.
“Our CIO wanted to go with a “Cloud First” strategy, and Omada Identity Cloud met almost 100% of our requirements with their feature-rich IGA solution.” – Michel Mohammadi, BVI Programm & Project Management, DEKRA
Requirements and Selecting Omada
When evaluating both their needs and wants, DEKRA knew they not only needed a standards-based IGA tool that wasn’t overly complex to manage but also that would be able to support a variety of governance tasks to enable their digital transformation. There was also a growing need to automate preparations for compliance audits for standards-based requirements like GDPR and TISAX (ISO27001). DEKRA’s new CIO wanted to deploy a “Cloud-First” strategy to offload the need to perform regular upgrades and infrastructure management. As such, the team worked to put together a comprehensive list of about 200 access and governance requirements that they were looking for from a vendor.
“A lot of people told me that it’s not possible to migrate from an old self-developed system into a new SaaS system quickly, but we showed our board that it was possible.” – Michel Mohammadi, BVI Programm & Project Management, DEKRA
Omada Identity Cloud, a SaaS-based IGA solution, jumped to the top of the list, as it satisfied nearly 100% of DEKRA’s requirements. Omada was also able to fulfill DEKRA’s requirement to integrate with a wide range of applications to support employees and contract workers across multiple countries and regions. In addition, Omada Identity Cloud is built on Microsoft Azure which helped simplify DEKRA’s experience with adopting it into their production environment, which has a large mix of applications, but their workforce is most comfortable in Microsoft.
Implementation and Use Case
The Omada setup took a week, and the implementation was rolled out successfully in four phases, leveraging the framework outlined in Omada IdentityPROCESS+. DEKRA has since deployed the following use-cases for Identity Governance and Administration:
- Identity lifecycle management
- Access request and approval process
- Recertification
- Automation of audit process
With Omada Identity Cloud, DEKRA now can provision the right identities to have access to the right applications for the right reasons. It also has made it easier to assign access in regions and manage the end-to-end lifecycle of each identity as roles and responsibilities change. Plans to integrate with SuccessFactors and ServiceNow are underway.
“We now have solid processes for recertification and audit permissions that give us full visibility. Our front-end customers can now easily request access and get access to applications quickly leading to significant productivity and time savings.” – Michael Vogt, Head of DPDC DC EMEA Delivery Center North, DEKRA Group
Results
The DEKRA team is well on its path to successfully replacing its old solution with the new modernized IGA solution to further enable their digital transformation. They have been able to streamline and automate the access request and approval process, reducing the number of calls to the Help Desk, as well as ensuring quicker access where appropriate, with the proper security controls in place. DEKRA has seen tangible returns on investment (ROI) within 6 months and is quickly scaling the solution to meet additional use cases.
With Omada, DEKRA is already beginning to see improvement in productivity and efficiencies through:
- Reduction in help desk calls
- Reduction in time to onboard new employees from weeks to hours
- Significant reduction in the time required to prepare for audits
- Reduction in time required to create new user accounts and provision access
- Fewer resources now needed to manage IAM (Identity & Access Management)
