84.51°: Automating Identity and Bolstering Security with Clear Skye

84.51°, a retail data science, insights and media company for Kroger Company, employs over 1,500 team members tasked with analyzing data generated from more than 60 million households and 3 billion shopping baskets. To power this type of work, it takes 1,400 roles, 350 applications, and multiple separate directories and environments from on-premises Active Directory, to Office 365, Azure, Okta, and more.

Between the continuous addition of locations where data was housed, and regulatory requirements to perform user access audits, 84.51° needed a better way to manage identity, configure solutions, and change workflows quickly and at scale. With the sheer number of employees and breadth of data being collected, strong identity controls were necessary not only for data protection, but employee productivity.

As you can guess, doing this was easier said than done. When Lead Security Analyst Chris Miller first joined 84.51° in 2017, 50 percent of his time was spent provisioning. With mostly manual, ad hoc processes in place, he compared getting access-related help desk tickets to “a guessing game.” Historically, decisions were made based on related coworkers’ access or Active Directory groups—not an exact science.

84.51° needed to modernize its identity program, and fast. But the prospect of a complex, labor-intensive, “rip and replace” technology implementation was not in the cards. Fortunately, this played out in the company’s favor because they had something better than a new and shiny SaaS solution: ServiceNow. Taking advantage of its existing investment in the ITSM platform, 84.51° was introduced to Clear Skye, and the rest is history.

Because Clear Skye was built natively on ServiceNow, the need to rely on other security teams for troubleshooting was eliminated, saving 84.51° time and money. The tool’s centralized user portal on the ServiceNow platform enabled users to directly request the access they needed. By automating workflows with Clear Skye, both security teams and end users benefited. Processes became smoother, all while bolstering security and streamlining business operations.

84.51° opted—smartly, in our humble opinion—to leverage the power of the ServiceNow platform and Clear Skye to take its identity governance and security to the next level. With features that make workflows more intuitive, compatibility with other solutions, and the ability to significantly reduce risk, the only complaint from 84.51° is that they wish they started sooner.

To learn more about how 84.51°  optimized their identity program with Clear Skye and ServiceNow, download our new case study. If you missed it, you can also tune into our recent webinar with Chris Miller on best practices for automating identity security.

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