NTT DATA deploys a scalable, frictionless user experience with Okta

Innovating toward unity

It’s evident why innovation is integral to NTT DATA—its parent company is nearly 120 years old and has evolved through shifts from the telegraph to the telephone to today’s digital landscape. One of NTT Corporation’s 900 companies around the globe, NTT DATA has a history of excellence in technology that dates back 50 years. The organisation’s 120,000 employees span 50 countries worldwide, delivering infrastructure, applications, and business process services to clients.

“We have the privilege of working with 85% of the Fortune Global 100 across verticals from manufacturing to finance to healthcare, and solving the challenges they face to drive value to their businesses,” says Steve Williams, enterprise chief information security officer at NTT DATA Services.

Over the past 15 years, NTT DATA’s merger and acquisition strategy has driven a large part of the company’s growth, enabling it to bring new and influential products to market. With such a diverse portfolio, the need to reduce complexity and become “One NTT”. This initiative aims to construct a worldwide support structure to provide the company’s customers with access to more services and greater efficiencies. At the same time, digital transformation has prompted NTT DATA’s clients to think about their own competitive advantages in terms of data protection.

“Our clients tend to ask how technology can help them do something faster on a larger scale, or improve an experience for their end customer,” Williams says.

NTT DATA has also helped many clients transition to the cloud and reach their customers within a mobile ecosystem. As such, trust is integral to the company’s relationships with its clients.

“Our clients wouldn’t come knocking on our door if they didn’t trust what we do and how we approach solutions, and that we have their best interests in mind,” Williams says.

A massive database and complex authentication

To support the “One NTT” vision, NTT DATA needed to eliminate complexity and streamline operations. With 300,000 employees throughout 90 countries in the parent company’s sprawling database, name conflicts were common. Onboarding, role changes, and offboarding also posed challenges within NTT DATA’s, data-centric approach to security. The company needed to shift focus to identity in order to control risk in a more effective, automated manner.

“It was very hard to judge whether someone was the same Steve, or Betty, or Yin,” Williams says. “We needed help to look beyond traditional attributes and think about a digital birthright, so that we could make judgements that would otherwise be very challenging to make on name alone.”

NTT DATA’s identity and authentication challenges were exacerbated by the fact that almost 60% of the company’s staff works off-site on consulting assignments.

“Identity-centric processes were a significant pain point for our business,” Williams says. “We spent dozens of people’s time every week trying to solve challenges that we knew we needed to automate in a clean, consistent, repeatable fashion.”

NTT DATA’s prior technology solutions also caused user experience hurdles in instances such as communication with downstream apps. If a user experienced a problem, they would have to open a ticket or call the service desk, then wait several days for another team to review the ticket and resolve the issue. Authentication was also a disjointed process.

“Before, when we used the term single sign-on, that just meant you had to log in once to a web application. You’ve already logged into your desktop, now you have to log into your phone, then you have to log into this next thing. That’s not single sign-on to anybody,” Williams says.

A like-minded partner and an agile solution

NTT DATA’s partnerships play an important role in the company’s innovation strategy. Sound corporate citizenship is paramount to the organisation, which is why its partnerships are driven by alignment around values.

“We’re looking to build long term relationships. If we share a common ethos towards solving a problem, that’s incredibly powerful,” Williams says. “But one company can't solve today’s problems, so we also need our partners to partner with other people.”

Flexible identity-related functionality was also high on NTT DATA’s checklist for an IAM partner. With multiple acquisitions per year, the company needed a solution that would enable it to advance faster and with greater agility than its previous identity framework. The organisation also wanted to make security simple for its internal and external stakeholders, empowering them to focus on doing their jobs while automating tasks that were better suited to machines.

“My strategy for securing people is, ‘identity is the new perimeter,’ so I needed a digital ecosystem that would give us freedom to run the business while managing risk the way we needed to manage it,” Williams says. “Our digital universe has to communicate at wire speed and transact business in an automated fashion. I'm looking for my partners to move in the same direction at the same pace.”

NTT DATA evaluated several different technologies as part of its search for an IAM solution, and even considered the idea of building its own solution in its R&D lab.

“We chose Okta predominantly because of its flexibility, agility, and risk management. The other reason was because the Okta leadership team shares our ethos in terms of always striving to be better. A high level of trust was always there with Okta,” Williams says.

NTT DATA purchased Okta’s Workforce Identity Products including Single Sign-On, Adaptive MFA, Universal Directory, and Advanced Lifecycle Management.

The company implemented Single Sign-On (SSO) first, because it wanted to prioritise user experience and enable stakeholders to get their work done in a seamless manner. It only took two months to onboard nine critical applications, and the rollout was smooth from start to finish.

When the organisation deployed Okta Verify, a component of Adaptive MFA that required more advanced authentication, some change management was necessary to let stakeholders know that the user experience would be different. Not only was it easy to onboard them—they asked why the solution hadn’t been put in place sooner.

With the Okta Identity Cloud, employees have reliable access to all of the company’s web and mobile apps, improving productivity. Company applications are accessible from anywhere and authentication challenges are reduced, enabling users to be logged in and operational within seconds.

“Our uptime and availability over the past two years with Okta has been unparalleled. We've had no production outages or issues,” Williams says. “To have our technologies stay up and function the way we need them to on a 24/7 basis across 50+ countries—that's a massive win for us.”

Reducing complexity

The next phase of NTT DATA’s Okta journey was to automate processes and solve for complexity. The company implemented Okta Workflows and integrated it with Office 365 to take the complexity out of identity creation. NTT DATA deployed a hub and spoke model, which includes one central engine as the hub that powers the various Okta organisations in NTT DATA’s identity ecosystem. Each organisation has its own spoke that connects to the central engine.

The central engine stores every identity ever created within NTT DATA, and applies a suffix to each to guarantee that no identity will conflict with another across the various spokes. This functionality eliminates manual processes associated with staff changes within the company. For example, if a new employee with the same first and last name as a current employee joined the organisation, Workflows will recognise and address the situation so that each user has a unique email address and username, and a unique ID that will follow them for their entire lifetime at NTT DATA.

“Okta is currently deployed to nearly 120,000 users, and we’re continuing to expand that footprint,” Williams says. “When we're done with our hub and spoke architecture, it will probably be around 10 spokes, one centralised hub, and the Okta Workflows engine to orchestrate the automation between all of those pieces.”

Scalable, automated identity management

Okta Workflows helps NTT DATA improve both onboarding and offboarding, and is powered by integrations that make risk assessment painless for users. The central identity hub enables the company to respond to challenges such as identity conflicts, while also applying sophisticated automation and logic to attributes such as email addresses.

Workflows also allows NTT DATA to customise automation based on user type and geography, making regulatory compliance seamless and eliminating manual processing errors. This automation has driven cost optimisation and allowed the company to focus human resources on other initiatives that can’t be automated.

“I can take a project that might have had 50 people associated with it, and bring it down to two, which has given me enormous efficiency gains,” Williams says. “For my team, the power comes in how they can automate simplistic tasks in a no-code style environment.”

Moving forward, NTT DATA will continue to save time on a massive scale with Workflows. Currently, seven departments and hundreds of people within the company are involved in HR-related activities. Now, processes such as granting access to retirement benefits will no longer be manual.

“Workflows is going to be a huge game changer for us. We’re really looking forward to having one orchestration engine drive the employee experience from start to finish, and seeing our employees have access to what they need post-retirement,” Williams says. “We want them to feel like everything is the same as it was on day one.”

A Zero Trust approach to security

“Okta is the centre of our Zero Trust universe,” Williams says. “Today’s workforce is not doing work the same way they were yesterday. If we can build our knowledge of a person who is requesting access, and I can trust that knowledge, then I can make incredibly informed decisions. Okta does that better than anybody else I've seen.”

Okta’s ability to integrate with other solutions such as CrowdStrike, Proofpoint and Tanium also provides huge value to NTT DATA, and helps the company solve problems across a broader security ecosystem. These integrations enable the organisation to assess and mitigate risks such as email compromise to make more informed decisions.

A dedicated partner with a customer-first philosophy

Not only has NTT DATA achieved success with the technological advances that Okta’s products facilitate—the partnership between the two companies is excellent. NTT DATA has a dedicated Okta customer success manager on-site to help solve problems in real time. The organisation also worked with Okta’s Professional Services team to adopt Workflows. They partnered closely with the team throughout the deployment to help them learn faster and do more with the product.

“Okta’s Customer Success team is a huge part of why we've been able to move so fast. They’ve put in a lot of care, patience, and shared blood, sweat, and tears—exactly what I'm looking for in a partner,” Williams says.

Drafting a new security roadmap together

NTT DATA plans to use Okta to roll out a new project dubbed “The Journey Towards Passwordless”, which will include enabling Windows Hello on Windows laptops. The project will move the organisation toward a more biometric approach that drives consistency between users’ mobile and desktop experiences.

Ultimately, Okta will continue to help NTT DATA scale at the pace that the business and broader industry requires. As the company adds thousands of contacts to its business almost every year, and adds new features, the need for a partner who can deliver on NTT DATA’s vision to prioritise user experience and make security invisible is paramount.

“In my world, a security roadmap is good for maybe the next two years. After that, you have to figure out what comes next,” Williams says. “Having partners like Okta, who understand that and who can help you push the boundaries of innovation, is huge.”

About NTT DATA Services

NTT DATA is a top 10 global business and IT services provider operating in more than 50 countries. It combines deep industry expertise with applied innovations across a comprehensive portfolio of consulting, application, infrastructure and business process services. NTT DATA is a part of NTT Corporation, a partner to more than 85 percent of the Fortune Global 100.