Automating and securing IT processes to support company growth
Founded in 2014, Aircall's mission is to make telephony simpler, offering a cloud solution for businesses that is integrated with their essential everyday tools. "By offering greater ease and transparency, Aircall helps businesses to focus on their operations," explains Anthony Gillaizeau, IT Director at Aircall. "With a few clicks, businesses can connect their call data with their CRM systems, helpdesk solutions, and other essential tools." Its cloud-based software is easy to install and keep up-to-date.
In addition to its headquarters in Paris, Aircall operates offices in New York and Sydney, serving more than 10,000 customers internationally. It's in the process of extending its reach, with commercial sales offices opening recently in London, Madrid, Sydney and Berlin. To keep pace with this growth, within a year and a half, it's almost doubled its number of employees, from 320 in 2020 to more than 600 in 2021.
Following a security audit, Aircall identified phishing and password piracy as key potential threats. To address these issues, Aircall decided to put in place an IAM solution, with the goal of enabling better control over the entire lifecycle of user accounts. "To make sure we're maintaining our core values with so many new people joining Aircall, we decided to restructure and optimize our internal operational processes," says Anthony." That's why we turned to Okta."
Looking for an IAM solution that makes it easy to integrate cloud resources
Aircall has taken a cloud-first approach from the start, with all its IT resources hosted and deployed in the cloud. Mr Gillaizeau's team is responsible for cybersecurity and access management, as well as network management, and the management of applications, hardware, IT support and IT projects. To help automate and streamline processes, Aircall decided to work with strategically selected partners.
To choose the most appropriate IAM solution, Aircall compared Okta to other leading solutions on the market. "Compared to other solutions, Okta is better adapted to our needs, and offers a broader range of functionality, as well as more ready-to-go integrations," says Mr Gillaizeau.
In the first three months of the first implementation phase, Aircall integrated four key tools with Okta: Atlassian, BambooHR, Salesforce and Google Workspace. To make this happen as quickly as possible, Aircall chose to work with Okta implementation partner Lyvoc, whose consultants have specialist knowledge of both Okta and HR-as-a-master implementations, "I chose Lyvoc because they share our outlook, which meant we were able to work together in a very effective way," says Mr Gillaizeau. "As well as supporting the implementation, they provided training for the IT team, which meant we were able to manage the tools autonomously."
Integrating IT and HR systems for better account lifecycle management
By integrating Aircall's HR system with Lifecycle Management and using Okta Workflows, the IT team is able to automatically assign access permissions for applications and tools such as Jira and AWS, as well as Slack and Google group membership, depending on an employee's department, role, and management level. "One of the reasons we chose Okta was because of Advanced Workflows, which enables us to carefully manage and automate many of our IAM tasks," explains Mr Gillaizeau. "For example, a new Google Workspace account is generated a week before a new employee arrives, so they can get used to the tools before starting work."
Previously, Mr Gillaizeau had to manually deactivate accounts when an employee left, which meant staying late to handle deactivations for the New York office, or working over the weekend. Now, both onboarding and offboarding tasks are handled by Okta, and the monthly compliance check is just a formality. The risk of security-related errors has also been reduced.
Aircall now has 35 applications integrated with Single Sign-On (SSO), around 90% of which use Okta's pre-built integrations. With SSO, employees benefit from easy and frictionless access to the tools they need, secured with Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication, using Yubikeys as a second authentication factor when necessary. "Our criteria are relatively strict, with a second factor requested if the employee changes location, computer, IP address, and so on," says Mr Gillaizeau. "It helps us to eliminate risky behaviours and to secure accounts when a computer is stolen, for example."
More efficient and more productive IT and HR teams
New employees sometimes arrive in a batch of 20 new starters at a time, and the IT team previously had to provide access to multiple tools for each new starter. Now, the team has gained at least one day's work a month, thanks to the automation of account access management. "When a new person arrives, they have immediate access to the tools they need, according to their role and access requirements," says Mr Gillaizeau. "The HR team is now able to take responsibility for employee access, which is much more efficient."
Mr Gillaizeau also believes that using Okta has made it easier to integrate new tools and applications. The team recently implemented access to a new tool within a single day, using SSO. "In terms of time to market, the entire company gains when our team is able to provide employees with rapid access to new tools," he says.
Finally, by making its IT and HR teams more efficient, Okta is supporting the future growth of Aircall. "The automation of processes with Okta has made my team more productive, and our access management is also more reliable," says Mr Gillaizeau. "The time it takes for an employee to become operational has been reduced, which makes it easier for our company to grow."
Continuing to evolve with Okta and Lyvoc, to invest in future growth
Security and identity are priorities for Aircall, both in terms of keeping its internal users secure and delivering a secure service to its customers. To make it even simpler and more secure to connect with Aircall, it's planning to launch a partnership with Okta in the coming year, to make Aircall available through the Okta Integration Network (OIN).
Aircall is also continuing to work with Lyvoc, who will support the development and implementation of more advanced Okta Workflows. "Working with an implementation partner such as Lyvoc enables me to focus on the essentials," says Mr Gillaizeau. "Okta is one of our trusted partners, and the work that we're doing today is an investment in the future growth of the company."
