By Alan Radford, Global Identity and Access Management Strategist at One Identity, and Andreas Muller, IT Project Manager at B. Braun
According to Gartner, converged Identity & Access Management (IAM) platforms will be the preferred adoption method for Access Management (AM), Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) in over 70% of new deployments by 2025, driven by more comprehensive risk mitigation requirements. These predictions are well understood by One Identity, recently positioned as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for PAM.
One Identity’s Alan Radford and Andreas Muller of B. Braun came together with other authentication professionals to discuss how to get ahead of this issue.
The Challenges: Managing size, complexity and diversity
B. Braun is a German medical and pharmaceutical device company, working across 60+ countries, with the help of over 60,000 staff. According to Muller, “Our main challenge, from a technical perspective, is consolidation across teams. We are working across several disparate geographies and teams with different owners. All these teams need to pull together in the same direction.”
This structural complexity is further compounded by the strict restrictions in place on medical manufacturing, which needs to be supported by security and Identity & Access Management policies. Restricting access to the data hosted on the B. Braun servers is crucial to ensure it remains compliant.
B. Braun needed a more effective way to manage user accounts and protect data. Andreas Mueller, IT project manager at B. Braun, says, “We had too many manual processes, which increased the time to create or delete a user account. Overall, there was too much risk of unauthorized data access and, therefore, a failure to comply with data security regulations.” Beyond automation, B. Braun also wanted an identity management solution that could drive digital transformation. “We’re moving some of our IT to the cloud,” says Mueller, “so we needed a solution that could talk to our on-premise infrastructure and cloud services, such as Office 365.” B. Braun hired One Identity to launch a proof of concept (POC) for Identity Manager. “Identity Manager delivered all the features we wanted,” says Mueller, “including cloud connectivity. What’s more, the technical sales team at One Identity offered to support a POC that integrated with our internal infrastructure. No other provider would go this far.”
The Results: Automation and support
B. Braun was able to work on improving its security policies by automating account provisioning and deactivation to ensure that Identity & Access Management is not an element of their policy, which is overlooked across multiple geographies. This has also ensured that company data is protected in its hybrid environment, featuring cloud and on-premises systems, both of which were still necessary in its environment.
For more than five years now, B. Braun has been successfully using One Identity’s Identity Manager solution to achieve support for both the company’s internal systems and extranet used by customers. “All the right people have access to what they need now that account creation and termination are automated with Identity Manager,” explains Mueller. “There’s complete transparency and greater protection of company data. Everyone knows the position of their requests within the workflow at any given time. There is also less chance of errors.”
Conclusion: Flexibility and responsibility
B. Braun’s issues and challenges are a telling insight into the role of IAM partners.
B. Braun looked to their IAM partner to ensure that they could retain the flexibility that a hybrid offering allows for, while bringing together disparate identities across different teams, regions and operational areas, while reducing friction and without compromising its security posture. One Identity was able to offer this, harnessing its years of IAM experience in automated authentication to work on the ‘principle of least privilege’ for both internal and external stakeholders.
Looking forward, B. Braun is hoping to continue to enhance its password management policies, automation programs for Identity & Access Management and to continue its focus on ensuring compliance and security standards are upheld.
About One Identity
One Identity delivers unified identity security solutions that help customers strengthen their overall cybersecurity posture and protect the people, applications and data essential to business. Our Unified Identity Security Platform brings together best-in-class Identity Governance & Administration (IGA), Access Management (AM), Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Active Directory Management (AD Mgmt) capabilities to enable organizations to shift from a fragmented to a holistic approach to identity security. One Identity is trusted and proven on a global scale – managing more than 500 million identities for more than 11,000 organizations worldwide.
