Neo Career uses Okta for authentication infrastructure and reduces operations costs

Integrating the authentication infrastructure to prevent silos

Neo Career Co., Ltd. (Neo Career) has been expanding their business domain with a focus on human resource-related businesses since their establishment in November 2000. In 2022 the organization established a new Digital Transformation Department with an emphasis on "accelerating the power of people with technology" in order to continue growing into a company that is needed by society. In addition to the traditional information systems department, which ensures the stable operation of multiple businesses, the company established a department to quickly carry out full-scale digitization and modernization initiatives based on company-wide strategies.

The most important goal of the Digital Transformation Department’s digital strategy is to break down and prevent silos. Neo Career has over 60 divisions, and each division uses different systems. Digitization efforts made in a silo may isolate departments and systems within the organization, making collaboration and information sharing difficult. The Digital Transformation Department’s key mission is to seamlessly connect these disparate systems and provide shared value to customers while integrating information.

The Digital Transformation Department prioritized sales, cost, customer satisfaction, and management accuracy and started DX from the authentication infrastructure, data infrastructure, and security. For the authentication infrastructure, the company selected Okta Workforce Identity Cloud (Okta WIC), which can be integrated with many systems and is less prone to vendor lock-in. Neutrality is at the core of the design philosophy.

After starting the Okta WIC contract, the Digital Transformation Department started by migrating 10 company-wide common systems, including internal portals, customer management systems, and forecast management systems. After gaining some knowledge and expertise, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Department introduced Okta WIC later that year.

The company's BPO division provides business process outsourcing services to more than 3,000 companies and handles over 200 systems, including in-house systems and systems leased from companies. Since IDs and passwords for each system are different, operational costs such as password management, account inventory, and reissuing passwords in the event of forgotten passwords are often incurred. Therefore, the company decided that integrating identity authentication would reduce security risks in addition to operational costs and would be extremely cost-effective in terms of cost and management accuracy.

Okta's implementation yielded significant returns from the first year.

As the Digital Transformation Department had planned, Okta WIC brought Neo Career huge benefits. To begin with, in qualitative terms, the deployment of the solution was easy. It is difficult to issue IDs & passwords and explain to nearly 4,000 employees when introducing or switching business systems, but with Okta WIC, there is no need to exchange IDs & passwords. Employees can use single sign-on (SSO) by logging into Okta’s My Page, which has improved user convenience as well as reduced management and operational overhead. From the quantitative aspect, "By introducing Okta, we successfully reduced operating costs in the BPO Operations Departments by 240 hours/month (1.5 man-months)," says Katsuya Matsuoka, general manager, Digital Transformation Department, Corporate Planning Division.

In particular, Okta WIC's Secure Web Authentication (SWA) feature, which enables SSO for applications that do not support federation protocols, significantly helped with authentication integration. In addition, the system administrator of BPO Operations Department manages the IDs and passwords of each system on Okta, allowing those in charge to log into the system through SSO using their Okta ID and password. This also benefits employees as they don’t need to manage their IDs and passwords, and admins can identify problems in the event of an incident.

The Digital Transformation Department initially estimated Okta would achieve a positive return on investment in about three years. However, the effects of implementing Okta within the BPO division were not included in the original plan, and the returns on investment in the first year were much larger than originally expected. Leading to a positive return on investment in just one year.

"The business growth potential of the BPO division is very high, and we are starting to take a new direction by moving part of our business fully remote starting in the next term. Okta WIC has been a good companion for us, as it has helped us to improve cost-effectiveness, balance SG&A expenses, and make new investments. Okta WIC may be seen as a security product, but we see it as an investment from the perspective of business efficiency and growth," says Katsuya Matsuoka, general manager of the Digital Transformation Department, Corporate Planning Division.

From the next term onward, Neo Career expects to expand the use of this system to other business units, and anticipates a full-scale return by integrating identity authentication in all systems using Okta WIC as a company-wide policy. In addition, Neo Career plans to continue to invest in their partnership with Okta by introducing Okta Customer Identity Cloud (Okta CIC), which enables integrated management of customer IDs and passwords.

In addition to SSO, the Digital Transformation Department is also working to streamline operations with additional Okta features. The team is using Okta Universal Directory to synchronize user information in Active Directory, Okta Lifecycle Management to automatically manage accounts according to the user’s lifecycle, and Okta Workflows to automate license allocation for some business apps. “Okta has made provisioning and account management easier and enabled us to respond to business unit requirements with more detail,” says Genshin Hamano, group manager, Corporate Planning Department Information Systems Division, System Operations Group.

In the future, Neo Career plans to implement two-factor authentication using the Okta Verify application along with passwordless authentication with Okta FastPass, both of which are tailored to mobile device deployment.

About Neo Career

Neo Career Co., Ltd. was founded in November 2000 by nine new graduates and has grown rapidly to currently have 21 group companies and over 3,000 employees. The company is developing various businesses to solve social issues related to people, mainly in the human resources, media, healthcare, IT and overseas business domains. As the company enters its third growth phase in 2022, it has renewed its "NEO CAREER STATEMENT," which forms the core of the company's philosophy.