Identity and Access Management solution IDM365 for the Energy & Utilities Sector

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Challenges in your sector

Energy and utility companies today have more to deal with than ever before—from a complex and challenging regulatory environment, to ecological challenges and pressure from investors and shareholders to increase profits. 

Your solution

IDM365 has helped companies address their Identity and Access Management (IAM) needs throughout the energy and utilities sector—including electricity, oil and gas, sanitation, water distribution and other critical infrastructure providers. Our governance-based solutions deliver sustainable identity management for greater efficiency and cost savings, without compromising security or reliability.

We fully understand the stringent regulatory challenges in this market, and we have the solutions and support teams to help companies address them head on. Become SOX and NERC compliant with IDM365 while streamlining and simplifying labor-intensive compliance processes.

Escalating compliance mandates make it even tougher for utility companies as they continuously grapple with strict industry standards and business regulations. For many companies within the energy and utility sector, existing manual processes or ad-hoc solutions prove too costly, time-consuming, and inaccurate to be sustainable.

Controlling your environment

Traditionally, within energy and utility companies there has been little overlap between their IT departments and the engineering organizations responsible for the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Energy Management Systems (EMS) that control their operations.

With IDM365, energy and utility companies are empowered to define, enforce and confirm (through audits) that policies are in place, and that they have been applied and enforced evenly across the organization. IDM365 provides the tools to track user access to buildings, networks and applications, automatically generating reports that show detailed logs of user access activity for fast and effortless audits.

Compliance regulations

IDM365 helps your organization achieve compliance with regulations such as:

• SOX
• NERC
• ISO 27001

Operational risk challenges

Proper Account Termination
Research shows that over 40% of user access rights are not removed upon termination. These orphaned accounts increase risk exposure by a factor of 23—a staggering amount.

Management of a Central Security Policy
It is critical not only to define a central security policy but also to ensure that it is implemented and enforced across the entire organization.

Controlled Sharing of Information
Ensuring that different business units in your company can’t involuntarily share sensitive information is crucial for a company of your stature.

Secure Audit Trails & On-Time Reporting
A critical component of any operation is the detailed and trustworthy logging of information to later be used in audits. This data is to alert auditors of any potential compromises.

Secure Procedures for Access to High-Risk Systems and Databases
Ensuring that all the correct users have access to secured systems can be both difficult and tedious to manage. Properly managing access to these high-risk systems and databases is an essential component.

Challenge of cost reduction and optimization

Tedious manual operations
Forms are often manually filled out and sent out, requiring stamped approval by one or more managers. IT personnel who are tasked with managing users must then carry out each request one-by-one in each system and application.

Thousands of hours are usually spent by IT departments carrying out these tasks. It’s not an interesting job but highly paid employees usually carry it out.

On-boarding and off-boarding slows operations
Businesses often suffer because new employees have to wait long periods for their access to get added or updated. Automated role-based access provisioning cuts this time down.

Optimizing with IDM365

Speed up system deployment
IDM365 provides a structure for managing users that will mirror your business. With a proper overview and means to create access profiles that target users within groups, new systems can be deployed more rapidly than.

Some of IDM365 resource-saving features are:

• Self-service administration and personalization including password resets
• Increased speed and productivity through automation
• Delegated administration that allows data owners to manage access to resources rather than handing it off to a service desk or IT
• Role-based provisioning allowing management to assign new job functions themselves with as little as 3 clicks

Compliance through IDM365

Identity and Access Management (IAM)
It provides a foundation for information security and a top-level way for users to interact with security software and comply with data policies and governances such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).

Ensure transparency of complex IT systems
IDM365 provides automated processes for attestation, reporting, and segregation of duties (SoD), enabling your company to enforce policies. Transparency is further augmented by instant, up-to-date documentation and reports covering user access rights and entitlements. With access to all systems, effective governance, risk management and compliance can be achieved.

Enforce access policies
IDM365 provides a strong defense against inappropriate information access through IAM. Rapid, secure processes ensure detailed recording of changes and transactions.

Manage access through roles and attributes
IDM365 merges Role Based and Attribute Based Access Control (RBAC & ABAC) to handle user access in a way that management can understand and that looks at each user individually. As an example, two identical users may require different access if they’re at different locations.

The IDM365 Rapid Implementation Policy

The deployment of a tool for IAM can be tedious and for many often runs over time and over budget. We have developed proprietary tools that allow us to rapidly set up IDM365 in a new environment.

IDM:CLEAN is our analysis tool which we use to generate reports for each system involved in the implementation. These reports identify permissions that are redundant, no longer in use, or that can be removed for other reasons.
Read more about IDM: Clean here

IDM:ORGANIZE is a tool for automatically generating suggestions for role design and mapping based on the data gathered during the CLEAN process. This special software engine was developed in-house based on highly complex pattern recognition formulas.
Read more about IDM: Organize here

Quick implementation, fast ROI, uncompromising, streamlined, reasonably priced, API’s included… let us help you get control!