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Adwoa Boateng-Kwakye: Welcome back. Now that you know
what Microsoft’s identity governance solutions are, let’s
switch gears and talk about some use cases for governance.
I’ll state the organization and Joe will explain what the
business challenges were and how Azure AD features were
used to solve the challenges.
In our first case study, we’ll look at our own organization,
Microsoft. Just like any other organization, we also have
challenges around the management of identities.
Joe, what was the biggest issue facing Microsoft and how
did Azure AD help solve them?
Joe Dadzie: Yes, the challenge that Microsoft had was too many
users in admin roles because when projects finished, no
one cleaned up admin access rights. This had happened
over time, so what the Microsoft IT folks wanted to do was
to first find out all the users that were in admin roles.
Secondly, determine if they should still be in those roles.
And for the ones that needed to be in admin roles, remove
their persistent admin access so that they went through
a process to get admin rights based on business needs.
With Azure AD Privileged Identity Management features,
they were able to quickly identify those users who
didn’t need privileged roles and execute on their plan.
For example, the team was able to reduce permanent
global administrators by 98%. And they were left with
two permanent admin accounts. These were the emergency
break glass accounts. They also now have monitoring on admin
account creation to cut potential back door account creation
by rogue admins.
Adwoa: 98% reduction in global administrators is a significant
accomplishment for any organization. That’s great.
In our second case study, we will look at Avanade, which is
a global IT professional services company with employees
collaborating with hundreds of clients, partners, and
vendors. Can you walk us through the challenges that we’re
facing and how Microsoft Azure AD helped them resolve
these challenges as well?
Joe: Yes, this is another great example where Azure AD’s
identity governance capabilities helped the customer address
some of his business challenges.
As you mentioned, Avanade is a global professional services
company, and so they have consultants working with clients
all over the world. They needed a standard efficient way of
onboarding clients onto projects to improve their speed of
delivery but also provide the right security guardrails,
especially in regulated industries.
Their previous process required IT to issue different identities
for clients which was cumbersome and took days to complete.
With Azure AD, they were able to leverage their guest B2B
together with entitlement management delegation
and self-service capabilities to streamline the collaboration
scenarios for project teams. The process now just takes a
few hours to setup and they are successfully using it over
400 partner organizations. Clients use their own identities
to access project resources. Documents are no longer
shared through email. And the security and risk compliance
needs required are being met. The Avanade team provided
great feedback on the product to make sure it met their
needs.
Adwoa: With Avanade collaborating with that many external
users, this must have been very valuable for them. It’s
fascinating to know that Azure AD features were you used to
solve these business challenges. Joe, thank you for your
insights; it’s been informative.
Guess what? If you want to get started with deploying these
governance features, I would like to remind you that your
purchase of Azure AD Premium licenses provides you with
access to a FastTrack engineer who will guide you on how
to deploy them in your organization. To request for assistance,
go to the FastTrack portal at microsoft.com/FastTrack.
Also, for more information, please go to these resources
on your screen. For Azure AD governance documentation,
aka.ms/IdentityGovernance. To give us feedback, go to
aka.ms/AzureADFeedback. For the Microsoft case study,
go to aka.ms/PIMatMS. And the Avanade case study, go
to aka.ms/AvanadeELMCase. Thank you for watching.
Joe: Thank you. Review these case studies and I hope they
can help you and your organization address your identity
governance needs.
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