Accenture: IT Security

Accenture’s implementation of Oracle Identity Management software centralized and streamlined identity and access management processes across the organization and provided a platform from which to address issues in other, more complex processes. Improving its identity and access management processes to gain better control over IT access, helped the company make effective use of its technology—which is key to achieving high performance.

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. With more than 187,000 people in 52 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$23.39 billion for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2008.

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Accenture had a variety of manual IT user identity and access management processes that had evolved over time and were creating significant inefficiencies in its efforts to ensure that systems were kept secure.

Users with password problems had to call a help desk for assistance from live agents, who were fielding some 6,000 password reset calls a month. “It was a manual process, and the way to deal with any password issues was to pick up the phone and call the help desk,” says Jeff McIlrath, CIO information security lead at Accenture. As the company grew, the process—and several other manual security-related activities—were becoming increasingly costly and cumbersome, and could have limited the company’s ability to leverage IT in support of high performance. Accenture turned to its own Oracle Security group, including professionals from the Accenture Delivery Centers in Manila and Bangalore to implement a solution to meet the company’s business needs.

• Re-thinking password resets
  Accenture used Oracle Identity Manager software to centralize and streamline identity and access management processes across the company. With this system, employees with password problems work with an online, intuitive self-service interface to answer personalized verification questions to be automatically identified and allowed to reset their passwords.
  
  With Oracle Identity Manager in place, the company had a platform that it could build on to address other inefficiencies. The CIO Organization turned its attention to the process used to register authentication tokens and associate them with employees’ enterprise-wide user IDs. Accenture redesigned this registration to condense seven pages into one, a simplification that made it easier to complete the registration using the online, automated system.

• Tackling complexity with automation
  Accenture then began to use the Oracle Identity Manager platform to address one of its more complex processes—the provisioning of key SAP enterprise applications, including its customer relationship management, human resources and business warehouse systems.
  
  Using Oracle’s out-of-the-box connector for SAP, Accenture automated this entire provisioning process, providing some key enhancements along the way. With the implementation of Oracle Identity Manager, Accenture was able to expedite the entire process, giving administrators the option to modify requests, add comments and allow the appropriate level of access.

• Teaming for innovation
  Accenture brought together skilled professionals from a variety of internal and external groups including its Delivery Centers in Manila and Bangalore and professionals from Oracle Consulting Services to manage these complex efforts.

With the use of Oracle Identity Manager, Accenture has been able to standardize and centralize its approach to identity and access management, and automate and streamline previously cumbersome security-related tasks.

Accenture continues to build on its Oracle Identity Manager platform. Since the completion of those initial projects, the CIO Organization has enabled help desk agents to use the verification question database and authentication tokens to identify callers—a cost-effective approach to providing additional security. The system now handles some 8,500 transactions a month, and the password reset initiative has dramatically cut the need for human intervention, eliminating 80 percent of the calls coming into the help desk and yielding $2.8 million in savings in three years. “With Oracle Identity Manager, we have been able to bring the company cost-efficiencies while strengthening security, and we have a platform that will let us continue to pursue continued improvements in the future,” says McIlrath.

The overall, net savings to date from the initiative has exceeded $3.2 million. And while not quantified fully, with the implementation of Oracle Identity Manager, Accenture has been able to certify with confidence who has or had access to what, when, why and approved by whom within the SAP application; a requirement for Accenture’s Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Most importantly, Accenture has improved its identity and access management processes to gain better control over IT access, helping the company make effective use of its technology—which is key to achieving high performance.