A security and Identity solution fragmented in too many parts
With more than 225k employees across 100+ locations, Jabil is constantly looking for ways to design innovative manufacturing solutions for a diverse set of customers in a range of industries.
Every minute has an outsized impact on Jabil’s bottom line. The company needs secure ways to help its workforce, including both factory line staff (direct) and corporate office (indirect) employees, do their jobs efficiently. The company’s teams rely on hundreds of applications which means each employee’s journey begins with Identity. But Jabil’s legacy identity solution cost them precious time and resources.
An inflexible Active Directory implementation limited IT’s visibility into Jabil’s user base, and Identities were spread across several disparate platforms. “Our old solutions were convoluted,” said Andrew Pruitt, Manager of Identity. “Those complicated tools often led to support calls because users weren’t created, somebody wasn't added to a group, or attributes weren’t updated when they should have been.”
The solutions weren’t just convoluted for end users, they also posed complex challenges to the IT team. Provisioning accounts was time-consuming; taking up to a full day for each new employee, which adds up with over 420,000 job changes per year.
For end users, operating with disparate identities and no single sign-on functionality meant logging into multiple apps with different credentials. These issues are especially disruptive for direct employees who have limited access to personal devices for authentication. This meant shared workstations posed potential security risks.
In this fractured ecosystem, Jabil had no single source of truth for Identity. To best support its global presence, streamline IAM, and enhance the user experience for employees, Jabil adopted Okta as its identity partner in 2016.
Simplifying the user experience for frontline personnel and firewall experts
Jabil turned to Okta to modernize its identity management infrastructure without disrupting operations. This process began with a company-wide rollout of Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multifactor Authentication (MFA). “With nearly 2,000 applications across Jabil, having one place to access them all means teams can start work faster while we’re better able to protect them,” said Pruitt.
Alongside security, user-friendliness is core to the Jabil employee experience. With Okta, any employee can access essential information and apps securely and easily. “Our company has a wide range of technical expertise levels,” Pruitt said. “We need to make identity as easy to manage for potato farmers as it is for career technical engineers.” Improving the user experience with Okta has reduced incoming IT service tickets to the point that fewer than 1.5% of Jabil employees require technical support per month.
Carefully manufactured Identity protection
With a focus on becoming more efficient, Jabil migrated more than 115,000 users from its previous identity solution in just six weeks. The migration connected siloed, manually managed software platforms such as Jabil’s Workday instance and ServiceNow, which controls application access.
Workday is Jabil’s source of truth for people data, and connecting it to Okta provides individuals a clear, securely managed identity. The Workday as a Source architecture helps eliminate manual errors in account management by automatically creating and provisioning user accounts to simplify onboarding.
"We were running manual, custom reports from Workday, and it meant our data sync time took 22 hours which wasn’t manageable in a single day,” said Pruitt. Today, with the Okta and Workday integration, our sync takes less than three hours." Jabil is now using real-time syncing, so information is updated the moment changes are made.
With the new setup, the team has further automated application access with ServiceNow. “Once Okta creates a user, we can provision directly into ServiceNow,” Pruitt said. “As soon as someone has an employee ID, they’re in ServiceNow and can access the apps they need. The inverse happens just as quickly when contracts terminate.” This instant change helps Jabil protect against data leakage at scale as tens of thousands of employees join and leave every month.
Jabil’s IT team is also using Okta Lifecycle Management and Workflows to further automate processes and simplify administrative tasks. “We’re using Workflows to send out automated notification emails and front end web forms that communicate with ServiceNow,” Pruitt said. “Centralizing management also gives me control and visibility into event history, so I have a clear record to refer back to.”
Supporting production efficiency by future-proofing identity management
Since adopting Okta, Jabil has grown considerably, but the company’s commitment to innovation means the work is never done. To continue scaling effectively, Jabil migrated its Okta Classic instance to Okta Identity Engine (OIE) in less than 6 months through self-service upgrade tooling. “OIE was easy to implement and adopt for our administrative team, reduced our technical debt, and allowed us to tailor access to balance business needs with security,” said Robert Oliphant, IT Security Analyst.
Once the implementation was scheduled and the foundation laid, the new OIE instance was up and running in less than 90 seconds and Jabil was set up to take their identity management to the next level.
Growing from keycards to biometrics and beyond with modern Identity
As Jabil continues to automate and evolve its Identity management, the company has set its sights on further reducing onboarding to just an hour—and eventually minutes.
Part of Jabil’s broader identity strategy is becoming a Zero Trust organization—one that requires authentication for all user activity. Jabil plans to add app-specific security policies along with FastPass to further secure authentication. This will provide an even better user experience with biometric login across devices and access points. “We have to protect our customers’ intellectual property which makes having devices for MFA in our facilities difficult,” said Pruitt. “With OIE and FastPass we can take our security to the next level.”
About Jabil
Jabil is a global manufacturing company with more than 250,000 employees across 100 locations in 30 countries. We’re big; but we’re not a household brand because most of what we make is for our customers. That list includes 300 of the biggest brands in the world in every market from healthcare, packaging, smartphones and cloud equipment to automotive and home appliances.
