Xchanging: Overcoming the Identity Consolidation Challenge with Okta

As Whitehall Media rightly pointed out recently at its Identity Management conference, the ever-changing digital landscape we face today brings about an increasing amount of threats. And there’s little room for complacency in securing entry points and data assents – both in large enterprises and government. That’s why on a global scale, the IAM landscape is expected to grow from just over $5 billion in 2013 to $10.39 billion in 2018.

We recently attended the event to discuss those challenges and risks facing large enterprises and support our customers addressing them everyday. The topics ranged from risk management and security, to encryption techniques and user management – to name a few.

Okta customer Xchanging presented its IAM consolidation story at the event. Lee Cunningham, a solutions architect for Xchanging, outlined the company’s diverse infrastructure over the past 10 years, which is partly due to a highly successful period of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). Cunningham outlined how, like many organisations, Xchanging had multiple active directories and multiple access points for one identity in place. The large number of M&As introduced new challenges because of the influx of new users and applications and the fact that many clients weren’t able to access Xchanging’s on-prem systems. Like the majority of businesses today, Xchanging needed a new way to secure and control a magnitude of more users, devices and applications. The answer: cloud-based identity and access management.

Today, Okta acts as the “hub” for all of Xchanging’s identities and access points, provisioning all the different applications, like Workday, Jive and Salesforce.com, as required – now a user can be provisioned within half an hour in the cloud. We’ve also helped Xchanging to integrate its HR records with user records, allowing it to tie employer lifecycle and user lifecycle together.

Technology is constantly changing, and though this change brings added advantages of new upgrades and faster, better services, it also creates challenges. Often having the right IAM strategy in place is all you need to overcome these challenges. As Cunningham concluded, finding a provider that is able to work and adapt with you and the changing environment, is the most important thing.

Want to learn more? Watch some of the conference highlights here.