Wipro Limited, a consulting and business process outsourcing company, with an annual revenue of $5 billion, offers an extensive suite of services, including systems integration, consulting, cloud, mobility, information management, identity management, and infrastructure.
Catering to a wide array of customers across 175 cities, the company was required to enhance its internal operations to ensure seamless business activities, such as delivering IT and consulting projects, and reducing risk exposure, particularly after employees leave the organization.
What that essentially meant for Wipro was efficient provisioning and de-provisioning 150,000 user accounts and mailboxes. It wanted to gain ability to integrate user identity information with SAP human resources (HR) system and enable IT staff members to rapidly identify data issues and provide better services.
Wipro evaluated multiple identity management products and selected Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite Plus because of its strong relationship with Oracle’s product development team and clear roadmap for identity management solutions.
Wipro was also impressed with Oracle Identity Manager Connector for Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition, which enables seamless integration with internal business applications and external partners’ applications to enhance its competitive edge. “We found that Oracle’s identity management solution was moving in the same direction as Wipro’s specific business requirements. Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite Plus was clearly the right choice for us,” said Kamal Shah, general manager, Wipro Limited.
Wipro and Oracle worked closely to identify the business requirements for identity management. After four months of the initial implementation, Wipro automated its provisioning and de-provisioning capabilities in the stabilization stage.
The solution has now enabled Wipro to cut IT operating costs by up to 40%. It has helped Wipro update 24,000 user identities in a single day by eliminating redundant workload to manage individual user identities for each system.
That apart, it has reduced time to provision and de-provision 150,000 user accounts and mailboxes by 50%—in just four hours instead of eight hours.
“We chose Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite Plus for its superior integration capability and to extend our strong partnership with Oracle. We now update 24,000 user identities per day, halved provisioning time, minimized disruption to users and reduced IT operating costs by up to 40%,” says Shah.
Secured identity
The solution created a seamless user experience by providing mobile single sign-on service for most of the company’s business-critical applications, enabling users to access enterprise data such as cloud and consulting project information, anytime, anywhere on their mobile devices.
With minimized risks and in real-time capability, Wipro can now authorize or de-activate user accounts based on employees’ specific time zone instead of using Pacific time zone only, ensuring user identity data accuracy and meeting compliance requirements, said Shah.
There were other gains as well. Wipro also optimized IT resources by eliminating the time IT staff members spent—up to one week—manually reconciling and resolving identity and access management data inconsistencies in data reports, enabling them to focus on more productive projects
Disruption to business activities, such as providing consulting services to a large-scale banking project, by enabling users to access e-mails and applications were done immediately rather than waiting for up to one day with the legacy system. Oracle also helped Wipro cut support service requests by up to 20 percent per month and reduced time to resolve each service request by 25 percent by synchronizing centralized user identity information with SAP HR system.
“Effective identity and access management is essential to security, regulatory compliance and eventually leads to greater business success,” said Vivek Gautam, Research Manager, Software & Services, IDC India.
Despite that, he believes there are several implementation challenges faced by an enterprise. Businesses operating in a complex, heterogeneous environment, with many identities and directories and inconsistent password policies often cause challenges. Besides, the ever-increasing need for compliance regulations, among others also hinders its success.
Gautaum, however, stated that having a solid identity management system in place is worth the effort, despite the challenges. “Identity is the foundation of good security and solid regulatory compliance. To succeed, it requires extensive planning and control by the enterprise,” he tipped off, predicting a surge in these solutions in the increasing hyperconnected digital world.