North American Energy Producer nets major budget savings and more

How RadiantOne eliminated identity sprawl and provided a single stream of authoritative data

In the past five years, this Fortune 500 Energy Producer had navigated multiple acquisitions and integrations, a rebrand, and a 60% reduction in headcount to 4,000 employees and contingent workers. But with so much flux, it became painfully obvious that the company’s identity infrastructure couldn’t keep up.

“We had to stand up competing, overlapping architecture and infrastructure services to accommodate tactical business needs,” explains a Senior Identity Architect. “It meant there was more complexity, more overhead, a larger footprint infrastructure-wise, more complicated processes and little fiefdoms where every business unit had their own infrastructures.”

The identity sprawl resulting from acquisitions and rapid growth was complex, very expensive, and created serious security risks for the organization. At the same time, juggling end-of-life LDAP directories from Novell and Oracle resulted in “punishing” and “ridiculous” bills for support, he says.

Further, “We were bringing in WorkDay, a SaaS-based Azure platform, so we had to redesign and re-engineer our entire IT provisioning system.”

Rather than the existing disconnected, siloed system of identity that was so difficult to integrate with and evolve, the architect wanted to adopt a strategic, “identity as connective tissue” approach that would make it easy to connect platforms. RadiantOne’s interoperability, flexibility, and support for open standards enabled this framework.

The company needed a solution that could:

• Harness identity to increase cashflow while maintaining current staff levels
• Easily adapt to changing business needs
• Increase operational efficiency
• Right size the environment, reduce complexity and support costs
• Improve security posture
• Meet upcoming requirements for cloud adoption, orient solutions in light of hybrid identity reality
• Simplify gaining and maintaining access
• Increase automation and enable “self service”
• Support adoption of extensible, standards-based technologies

From disparate directories to one unified, centralized source

He turned to RadiantOne Intelligent Identity Platform, which he describes as a Swiss Army knife and Jack of all trades. The transition involved sunsetting the (twelve!) Novell and Oracle directories, migrating all of the identities from those disparate directories into the RadiantOne Universal Directory—with global profiles complete with detailed attributes and metadata for all users. Now, they are powering a sleek new provisioning system with a centralized, unified source of identity data–and better able to serve internal constituents with fewer resources and less manual effort.

That meant that rather than attempting to manage potentially overlapping, out-of-sync identity data in directories that were end-of-life, closed, proprietary systems, the company was able to provide a single stream of authoritative identity data to the new systems, such as Workday. That smooth transition was “the real cherry on top of the sundae,” he says.

“It helped us to sunset and migrate away from multiple technology platforms and legacy directories down to the RadiantOne platform, reducing redundant infrastructure,” he says. “It allowed us to rapidly ingest the changing landscape.”

By simplifying their infrastructure and retiring the legacy directories, the organization was able to reduce their tech-spend and extend their personnel resources to new initiatives, while laying the groundwork for the business agility their growth plans required.

Mitigating security risks through data unification

RadiantOne also proved crucial when the energy producer faced a security threat a few years ago. The company was in the midst of a challenging acquisition when it was discovered that a number of business applications posed security concerns–they didn’t want to wholesale open their environment to a potential risk, but they still needed to obtain data from the untrusted sources to complete the acquisition.

The situation required “a very prescriptive, directive approach that we were able to accommodate through Radiant Logic,” he says. “We could deploy Radiant Logic to connect and consume information from an untrusted environment that rapidly accelerated the ability to merge and onboard data.” The granularity and flexibility of the RadiantOne platform enabled them to quickly access what they needed, while buffering the environment from risk.

When the team has questions, it also knows where to turn: Radiant Logic’s vendor support staff, which the Senior Identity Architect calls “some of the best vendor support that I’ve ever encountered.”

That’s a huge reassurance, as the company–like most businesses–aims to stay nimble yet secure, in the rapidly changing business landscape. “Data is increasingly seen as an enabler, a business differentiator,” he says. Before the Radiant Logic transition, few of the senior leaders at the company had heard of this unified, streamlined approach to identity management, he says. But now that the system is up and running, “in our organization, leaders think it’s magic.”

Building resilience into core infrastructure

The saying “the only constant is change” holds true for good reason, especially in the Energy industry. After completing the IAM modernization effort—getting a handle on the acquired, dispersed identity data and consolidating their complicated directory and identity infrastructures—the client is better prepared for the inevitable business changes and challenges to come. Whether that’s a “Perfect Day 1” post-merger, reduced de-provisioning risk after divestitures are spun off, or faster time-to-value when collaborating with trusted partners—this organization is now better positioned technically, and has freed up both budget and key personnel, to adapt to the unpredictable.