A global Private Members’ Club with over 8,000 employees, contacted Atlas Identity for assistance with their Identity challenges, some of which were unique to the hospitality industry:
- The majority of employees are defined as ‘deskless’ (waiters, hotel staff, chefs, porters etc) who naturally have a high rate of turnover.
- The vast majority of employee access was managed manually by an IT support team and the manual process of allocating user access had introduced a significant delay and cost to the business.
- Additionally, the client’s customer key applications needed to be secured via 2-Factor Authentication to prevent significant risk to the business and the data stored within them.
The client chose to deploy Okta’s Workforce Identity Solution to save time, money and enhance their employee experience along the way. With no meaningful existing single sign-on (SSO) capability, they needed a quick solution for the projected growth of the business. The task in hand was to secure our client’s employees and the existing estate of over 100 applications. With Atlas Identity’s well-proven deployment methodology, several applications were integrated each week, in a prompt, efficient and well-structured manner.
Employee Data
The client’s business is spread over multiple regions, with each region having its own HR system. When work started with the client, employee data was transferred from the separate HR systems, downstream into the relevant applications, via an exceptionally large number of IT Support tickets. Today, all the client’s HR systems are directly connected with Okta, giving them their first universal directory spanning the entire organisation. The client now has SSO and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) in place for the majority of their applications, resulting in a huge reduction of security risk, with a roadmap to secure the remaining application during the upcoming year.
Employee Experience
With Atlas Identity’s support, today when an employee joins the organisation, they are quickly granted access in an automated manner, based on their job role. Changes to job roles are also reflected immediately to maintain proper role-based access rights and leavers are now immediately removed after their final day. Today, there is no need for manual intervention from IT Support, which has resulted in increased employee satisfaction and productivity.
COVID-19 and the Hospitality Industry
One year after the initial deployment of Okta was achieved, COVID-19 arrived. During this time, our client was required to suspend the vast majority of its sites, resulting in an extensive impact on the employee base. To handle this vast amount of change manually, would have been a massive undertaking. With Okta connected to the associated HR systems, this process worked invisibly with little or no manual intervention.
What’s Next?
With the expert help of Atlas Identity, the client is now looking to expand Okta to encompass the entire IT application estate and introduce additional automations, which will secure its business and support its growth into an expanding list of sites and regions.
