The Hartmann Group, a multi-billion Euro company and one of the leading providers of medical devices and hygiene products in Europe is using One Identity, a proven leader in identity-centered security, to manage over 8,000 digital identities across the globe for multiple applications, including SAP. With One Identity Manager, The Hartmann Group can monitor and provision permissions and accounts, giving them full insight into who is accessing what on the company network and helping to reduce the risk of data breaches while meeting compliance requirements. Importantly, the company has also cut down provisioning time – the time it takes to get users up and running – from over one month to just a few hours.
With more than 11,000 employees across the globe relying on access to multiple applications to complete their jobs, the management of each user identity presented a daunting challenge for the infrastructure team at The Hartmann Group. When confronted with a workforce exceeding 25,000 application accounts, each with a unique impact on the company, the importance of identity management on a wide scale became essential to securing the privileges of each individual user accessing a range of applications.
According to Massimiliano Ferrazzi, the Senior Manager of Global IT Services and Operations at The Hartmann Group, managing accounts of this magnitude has been made much simpler with the implementation of One Identity.
Using One Identity Manager has provided security teams with the tools necessary to monitor the permission privileges of account users. Ferrazzi stated that the most significant benefits are that “we know exactly when something has changed, and who has changed it.” This has allowed The Hartmann Group to “improve security” in a climate of increasing pressures from regulatory bodies. By increasing the security protecting important private data, The Hartmann Group is able to reduce the risk of a serious breach, along with the public fines that come with it.
Implementing identity management companywide allowed The Hartmann Group to reduce the strain on their identity management systems “by over 60%,” and automate the security process, ensuring greater efficiency going forward.
Ferrazzi stressed the importance of identity management at The Hartmann Group, specifically noting the SAP support team who isolate and resolve any issues with the application. These “employees require high levels of privileges, so it is really important to us that we monitor them closely.”
Using One Identity has provided security teams the insight to identify changes that have been made to critical applications, and who made them, thereby reducing the risk of insider threat. This improves security measures in industries that are subjected to data compliance regulation, because it closes gaps that might lead to data being leaked.
According to Ferrazzi, One Identity has provided a tangible benefit to business almost immediately by cutting down on the amount of time and resources that would traditionally be spent monitoring a workforce of this magnitude. The Identity Manager assists in the set up and management of user accounts, groups, roles, profile assignments and transactions making setup simple. Indeed, Ferrazzi had high praise for the product stating that “the integration with SAP out of the box is exceptional.” In the case of The Hartmann Group, provisioning was cut down from a month of onboarding, to simply a few hours.
Ferrazzi shared some insight into why identity management is essential in today’s climate, “Today, we are digitising everything. And the more simple the IT world becomes for the user experience, the more complex the security has to be. And in that case, identity management is key for a company to be secured, and ensure the user success, and control of those successes,” he concluded.
