OpenText™ identity and access management solutions boosted customer satisfaction, streamlined user access and security, and sped user onboarding by 30%

About Procomix Technology Group

Procomix Technology Group (PT Group), in affiliation with Aramys, delivers intelligent, creative, and cost-effective IT solutions in three major areas: users and their working environment, production and business continuity, and security and compliance.

Employees:

100+
Annual revenue:

€13 million
Experience:

20+ years

Summary

Challenges

Needed to secure user access to corporate applications and centralize access management.
Tasked with consolidating authentication silos and creating a single sign-on solution.

Solution

Integrated a suite of OpenText solutions to enable identity-centric authentication.
Consolidated user access administration.
Introduced privileged user access and multi-factor authentication.

Results

Delivered improved access security and auditability
Reduced costs by automating manual processes
Boosted user satisfaction with 30% faster onboarding

Challenges

Tasked with improving security—including privileged access؅—to an IT landscape of thousands of servers
Needed to create and govern Active Directory user accounts and streamline the user provisioning and deprovisioning process
Looked to save costs by automating manual tasks

PT Group delivers security solutions and services in the Middle East region. The group, including Aramys—who delivers the same expertise for European customers—has long partnered with OpenText on its full identity governance and administration solution portfolio. PT Group’s managing partner, Marie-Ange Mhanna Khater, commented, “We initially worked with one of our other technology partners on identity and access issues, but we found that with the global increased demand for cloud solutions, that became a clear focus direction for their solutions. However, in our region, a shift to the cloud is not yet a viable option for many of our customers, especially the ones active in the government and finance sectors. We were pleased to partner with OpenText as the identity and access management portfolio of solutions suited our customer base particularly well.”

When PT Group started working with customer Najm in Saudi Arabia, the team spent time understanding the issues the customer was facing. Najm offers a complete range of insurance solutions and services. It serves 40 Saudi cities through a skilled workforce specialized in reviewing accidents and addressing consequent losses, damages, compensations, claims, and other insurance-related services. With a distributed workforce of 4,000 and having to provide system access to an additional 2,000 external users, Najm’s Head of Enterprise Architecture, Hamza Mahafzah, explained the challenges, “Each of our applications managed its own authentication methods, often not supporting multi-factor authentication (MFA). This meant we could not provide centralized access and our users would need to authenticate for every application they accessed.”

He continued, “We have thousands of servers in our environment and no easy way to control them. Privileged access was not managed, and administrators had unlimited privileged access while shared accounts were not controlled. Managing our user accounts and individual access rights was a manual effort and there was always a risk that access rights were not adequately revoked when employees left or changed jobs.”

A system showing authentication and serve access graph

Leveraging OpenText, our end users and administrators have secure, centralized, and audited access to our applications as well as to protected servers and endpoints. Multi-factor authentication has improved our security, enabling our users access to our systems securely from any location.

Hamza Mahafzah
Head of Enterprise Architecture, Najm

Solutions

PT Group ensured OpenText identity and access management solutions integrated with Najm’s diverse IT landscape—giving users a single sign-on option and multi-factor authentication for remote access and controlling access to privileged systems.

Products deployed

OpenText™ Access Manager

Enable single sign-on and access control across platforms
OpenText™ Identity Manager

Simplify identity lifecycle management to ensure secure access
OpenText™ Identity Governance

Protect data with simplified compliance and access review processes
OpenText™ Privileged Access Manager

Secure and control privileged access to protect critical assets
OpenText™ Advanced Authentication

Enable passwordless and multifactor authentication

Integrating solutions to create an identity-centric authentication approach

The OpenText portfolio of identity and access management solutions offers an identity-centric approach to authentication, access, privilege, and governance. It is designed to manage risk with a modularized platform that delivers a unified, real-time view across diverse applications and systems. The Najm team liked that they could work with PT Group as a single point of contact and expertise while implementing OpenText identity and access management solutions.

As Mr. Mahafza commented, “We saw the value of the combined solution, including OpenText Access Manager with Managed Services, Identity Manager, Identity Governance, Privileged Access Manager, and Advanced Authentication. However, we wanted to ensure that we worked with a partner who could support any issues in connecting these components into an integrated solution for us. PT Group’s expertise and regional references convinced us this was the right partnership.”

Consolidating user access administration with effective integration

The first priority was to enable a seamless single sign-on experience across Najm’s diverse IT landscape. OpenText Access Manager with Managed Services enabled automated user provisioning and access management for 4,000 users to the organization’s Active Directory (AD), databases and servers, administration applications, corporate email, firewall, and business applications. As this is fully role-based, new users are automatically given the correct access privileges based on their job function and position in the organizational hierarchy.

OpenText Access Manager with Managed Services is tightly integrated with OpenText Identity Manager to streamline processes such as HR data synchronization, user provisioning and deprovisioning, and security. This, in turn, integrates with OpenText Identity Governance to create a unique, event-based solution for effective identity management and compliance enforcement. User identities and access across the Najm organization are efficiently managed with consolidated access administration.

Introducing streamlined privileged user access and multi-factor authentication

Prior to the OpenText implementation, Najm had to give unlimited access to all administrators, but OpenText Privileged Access Manager eliminated the need to distribute root account credentials to its entire administrative staff. It can now delegate administrative access through centralized policies. By managing privileges this way, Najm can control what commands users are authorized to run, at what time, and from what location.

The team also introduced multi-factor authentication with OpenText Advanced Authentication. This centralized solution consolidated authentication silos to reduce administration costs and enable greater security and manageability.

Person entering security information on a screen

Najm is a great example of a customer who benefited from OpenText identity and access management solutions, coupled with our expertise in managing identity lifecycles and integrating solutions for ease of access, improved security and governance, and ultimately enhancing the user experience

Marie-Ange Mhanna Khater
Managing Partner, PT Group

Results

6,000 users now enjoy the benefits of improved self-service, streamlined system access, and 30% faster onboarding. The IT team appreciates the improved security and automation to replace manual tasks so that the helpdesk can focus on value-add activities.

Delivered improved access security and auditability

Mr. Mahafza was clear on the security benefits of OpenText identity and access management solutions, “We can now automatically create AD user accounts and centrally manage access rights. Leveraging OpenText, our end users and administrators have secure, centralized, and audited access to our applications as well as to protected servers and endpoints. Multi-factor authentication has improved our security, enabling our users access to our systems securely from any location.”

Reduced costs by automating manual processes

With 4,000 internal users and 2,000 external users, it was important to Najm to automate as many manual processes as possible to reduce costs and use available resources more effectively. Mr. Mahafza was pleased to report that OpenText identity and access management solutions contributed greatly to this, “Introducing a self-service password reset solution reduced the demand on our helpdesk and meant that users can securely reset their own password form anywhere. At the same time, once we introduced OpenText identity and access management-powered single sign-on, we found that management of user credentials was simplified, as users only need to manage one set of AD credentials to access their applications across our IT landscape.”

Improved user satisfaction with 30% faster onboarding

With centralized access control to all systems, Najm now enjoys streamlined processes that have boosted user satisfaction. Mr. Mahafza concluded, “With an automated and standard identity and access management-driven process, we can set up new users 30 percent faster than previously, and that will improve even further as we add and integrate more applications. We enjoy working with the PT Group experts and look forward to expanding our OpenText implementation to help further reduce the demands of user management.”

Ms. Mhanna Khater added, “Najm is a great example of a customer who benefited from OpenText identity and access management solutions, coupled with our expertise in managing identity lifecycles and integrating solutions for ease of access, improved security and governance, and ultimately enhancing the user experience.”