Williams Energy adopts Dell One Identity Manager solution

By Sean Dudley on 21 August 2014

Williams Energy adopts Dell One Identity Manager solution

Williams Energy has streamlined its identity and access management process, as well as reducing its provisioning workload by 50%, with Dell One Identity Manager.

One of North America’s largest providers of energy infrastructure, Williams Energy needed to replace its outdated access request application to meet the demands of its businesses, which include interstate natural gas pipelines, midstream gathering and processing, transportation of natural gas and natural gas liquids, and olefin production.

The company’s previous access request application – which handles request from 6,500 users comprised of both employees and contractors – was cumbersome, time-consuming and frequently experienced downtime, effecting production efficiency.

“Williams Energy needed to replace its unwieldy legacy access request application with an efficient and automated identity management solution that would meet their needs without requiring a lot of customisation,” explained John Milburn, executive director, Identity and Access Management, Dell Software.

Williams Energy turned to Dell for a solution that would automate and simplify its identity and access management processes, while protecting against unauthorised access.

Dell One Identity Manager, which works with Microsoft SQL and runs on Windows Server operating systems, streamlines the access governance process of provisioning and managing user identities, privileges and security across the enterprise.

“Identity Manager’s simplified configuration provided the streamlined functionality and time-saving automation – with no business disruption – that enabled the company’s IT team to become a high-efficiency operation,” said Milburn.

It was vital for the new solution to deliver the high level of compliance Williams Energy already had, including preventing inappropriate access to sensitive applications by unauthorised users. The new solution also had to ensure that regular operations were not disrupted.

Identity Manager met the needs of Williams Energy and helps simplify major identity and access management tasks, reducing complexity, time and expense. Previously the company’s IT staff manually administered 3,000 and 4,000 provisioning tasks per month. With the new solution, that workload has been cut by 50% through automated identity lifecycle management.