With over 14,000 active employees and nearly 15,000 user accounts at any given time, Identity and Access Management was a major challenge. Add in the fact that over 200 applications are used on a daily basis, from point of sales, to financials and human resource information systems, you’ve got yourself a seemingly impossible task to manage identities securely and efficiently.
The customer in this case study is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) which offers telecom services throughout the U.S. The company also serves communities by providing mobile phone service to eligible low-income customers with free monthly data, unlimited texting, and free monthly minutes – a unique offering in the industry.
A few years ago, facing a shift in demand for its telecom infrastructure, the company found itself with excess capacity at its midwest datacenter. Although the company looked at migrating its services to the cloud, executives weren’t comfortable with the security and control offered by cloud providers. “At the time, it wasn’t practical or feasible for our client to move to the cloud,” said Andreas Katsaris, Senior Partner at Arisant. “But now that has changed.” To justify the move, the telecom company needed to be sure that any new cloud platform provided industry-leading security. “Their customers need secure data from a platform they can trust,” Katsaris says. The company also wanted a flexible platform that could work with multiple technologies and mixed workloads as well as rapidly provision new infrastructure services.
Costs were another important decision criteria as they looked to slash a large portion of the expenses it was incurring at its on-premise datacenter. Finally, during the transition to the cloud the company needed to ensure that its network remained available to its customers around the clock. “They have customers signing up every day and users need to add or ‘top up’ minutes on their phones,” Katsaris says. “We had to minimize any downtime when we moved.”
