CASE STUDY

The sky’s the limit
thanks to myID

Key Facts

Europe’s leading entertainment company paves theway for smooth expansion, while saving time andmoney with its centralised identity management
platform myID

CompanySky

Industry

Media & Communications

Country

United Kingdom

Employees

25,700Websitewww.sky.com
Challenges
To help its business growand empower its people, Sky
wanted to create a centralised
identity service, bringing
together tools, governance andprocesses to manage profiles
for its 25,700 employees.
Results•M anagers are empoweredwith web portal for managingteam members’ access• I dentity and access strategy
is set to enable smootherinternational expansion• Enhanced user informationdelivers better decisionmaking about data access•P ayment Card Industry
compliance is easier thanks
to automated, centralised
systemProducts
Identity Manager
Password Manager

Since the early 1990s, television and media have driven changes intechnology. From digital TV to on-demand services, Sky has always
been at the forefront of innovations in the U.K.
Formed in 1989, it is now Europe’s leading entertainment firm, offering
digital television and broadband services to 22 million customers acrossfive European countries. The company has annual revenues of £12billion and is the continent’s biggest investor in television. Sky’s successis not based just on what the firm does, but also how it does it. Its
commitment to social responsibility has seen Sky named as one of the
top 10 green companies in the world by Newsweek, and one of The Times
top 50 employers for women.

“Each day we need to give people great
reasons to choose Sky. By providing a betterlevel of service to our core business, we’re
helping to make Sky’s offering more attractive
to current and potential customers.”
Scott Cornfield, Identity and Access Manager, Sky

The organisation employs around
26,000 people across Europe,
which includes around 5,000
staff from recent acquisitions ofSky Italia and Sky Deutschland.
With such a large number of
employees, almost all of whom
are using Sky’s corporate
IT systems, managing andtracking user identities is nosmall undertaking. IT staff at
Sky had several identity andaccess management (IAM)
solutions in place, but thesewere implemented over time tomeet localised needs across thebusiness. As a result, there wasno single system that covered
the whole user base.

Creating an IAM hub
Scott Cornfield, Identity andAccess Manager, and hiscolleague Gareth MacGuire,
Identity Management TechnicalLead, took on the task ofcreating a centralised platform
for Sky’s corporate IAM needs.
Cornfield says: “IAM wasdevolved to individual support
teams and each team had its
own way of coping. The teams

were doing a great job, but
nobody in the company had acentral view of IAM, and lotsof people were spending timeand money managing a complex
network of systems. We knew
there had to be a better, simpler
way of doing things.”
The original driver for theproject was the need to replace
Sky’s first-generation identity
implementations, as well asdeliver business and security
benefits such as triggering
automatic shutdown of accessbased on information fromHR. This terminates all accessto Sky’s enterprise systems,
including its Payment Card
Industry (PCI) system. Since
its inception, Sky has kept on
growing, and Cornfield madea strong case that the firm
would soon become too large tosupport manual IAM. This helped
to solidify Sky’s plans to kick off
the programme.
Sky talked to various vendors
about consolidating all IAM
functions into one tool. It
also wanted to cut the costof maintaining the legacy

identity initiatives. Ease ofimplementation was a significantfactor. The winning solution
had to be highly customisable,
but relatively easy to configure.
Sky saw that One Identity
could meet these goals, as well
as offer additional benefits.
Specifically:• It was encouraged to see that
One Identity’s references inthis area came from companies
with small, efficient IT teams
like Sky’s.
• A proof of concept showed thatSky could achieve its goals
faster and with minimal burden
on the IT team.
The core of Sky’s IAM model,
which it calls myID, is Identity
Manager with Password Manager.
This enables Cornfield, MacGuireand the team to offer user
provisioning and deprovisioning,
password services and reporting.
The goal was to create an
identity solution providing
standardised services to all
stakeholders. Through Password
Manager, users can self-resetor synchronise their passwords
across all connected systems.

Sky now has around 500
managers looking after about
15,000 end users. Everyone –from the CEO to the engineers
who install dishes – has a profile.
MacGuire says: “It was easy todeploy to the internal corporate
estate. We had it up and runningwithin five months.”

Power to the business
The organisation now has control
over levels of access to Sky
systems. For example, as a PCI
company, Sky has to be able
to certify at any time that theright people have access to theright systems. Previously, thetechnology teams would haveto work independently to keep
track of this information andthen manage the responsibilityof periodically removing access.
Now with myID, the businessis empowered to authorise
employees’ access via one web
portal. This means technology
teams no longer have to keep
track, and the business doesn’t
need to learn new attestation
methods for each system. Now,
individual line managers canauthorise their team members’
access via one web portal. Thismeans they no longer have tokeep track manually or learn
new attestation methods. They
can even allow split accessin cases where an employee
needs different access rights
at different times because they
perform more than one role.

The benefits of automation
allow Sky to further improvethe efficiency and security
around managing the user
lifecycle for access. “Werecognise that Sky is a choicethat our customers make.
Each day we need to give
people great reasons to choose
Sky. By providing a better levelof service to our core business,
we’re helping to make Sky’s
offering more attractive tocurrent and potential customers,”
says Cornfield. “What this meansin real terms is that we can invest
even more in delivering great
content that our customers love.”

A full picture of accessinformation
The business is now able to
make smarter user and data
access decisions based on thequality of information it getsfrom the myID platform. Before,
users might be recorded in asystem as a two or three-digit
number in a database, but now
each user has a name, plus
information on where theywork in the business and what
systems they need access to.
Cornfield says: “Operations
are getting smarter. So, forexample, we’re able to predict
access levels based on job roleinformation from HR. This meansthat customer service staff – aswell as retail sales staff in theSky stores – are equipped withall of the information they need,and can hit the ground running.

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© June 2017, Quest Software Inc. All Rights Reserved

Previously, we had to spend a lotof time getting the data in andconnecting systems. Now, wecan afford to be more creative.
We’re looking at saving thecompany time and money, andremoving the element of humanerror wherever possible.”Will this platform make Sky’s
growth easier? “Definitely,” says
MacGuire. “Now we have ateam with skills and experiencein deploying and running theplatform for a large user base.
I guess we have transformed
Sky’s opinion of IAM into beinga feature-rich platform thatempowers the business. We’veachieved an incredible amountso far with a small team, andthe Sky’s the limit!

About One Identity
The One Identity family ofidentity and access management(IAM) solutions, offers IAM
for the real world including
business-centric, modular andintegrated, and future-readysolutions for identity governance,access management, andprivileged management.
Learn more: OneIdentity.com