Decentralized IAM leads to complicated identity for IT
When you care for your oral health, scrub your floors, feed your dog, or protect your skin from the sun, you very well may have chosen a brand from Colgate-Palmolive, such as Colgate – the brand found in more homes than any other. The company, which is reimagining a healthier future for all people, their pets, and our planet, is a global leader focused on Oral Care, Personal Care, Home Care, and Pet Nutrition. Their workforce of approximately 34,000 people located in approximately 100 countries utilizes Okta to support the company's continued innovation and growth.
Alexander Schuchman, Chief Information Security Officer, oversees security and network-related issues at Colgate-Palmolive — including identity and access management (IAM).
“We had a decentralized IAM infrastructure that had grown organically, with individual business units purchasing applications and managing identities for them independently, often at the application level or via different identity providers,” recounts Schuchman.
Employees had different user IDs and passwords for nearly every application they used, and the implementation of multifactor authentication (MFA) was inconsistent and scattershot, which increased security risks.
With this "hybrid IT" environment and increased distribution channels, the company needed a unified IAM platform that could handle a large enterprise and keep up with their business growth. “We wanted more than just a login simplifier with some identity governance and administration thrown in,” Schuchman says. “We needed a comprehensive identity solution that would be easy for our people to use.”
Unified IAM provides immediate productivity for all employees
Okta’s Workforce Identity solution matched Colgate-Palmolive’s global scale and Schuchman’s feature set requirements. The Company consolidated its IAM program to Okta, deprecating several identity providers (IdPs) and establishing Okta as a source of truth for identity information. Okta now integrates with more than 1,000 apps and masters all 34,000 employee identities across Colgate-Palmolive’s IT ecosystem.
“All employees, whether they work in supply chain, marketing, or sales, use the platform,” Schuchman explains.
Automated lifecycle management and threat detection, zero compliance issues
Okta Workflows and Lifecycle Management automate onboarding and offboarding for Colgate-Palmolive’s IT identity team — tasks that were previously handled manually. They manage which groups of employees have access to which applications and can amend those configurations in under a minute when employees change job functions. The ability to request access to other apps right from a user’s Okta dashboard allows the IT team to manage requests directly in the platform, saving them hours of manual work while improving user experience.
Compliance-related tasks like deprecating access to sensitive applications or exit notes can be handled simply by selecting a checkbox in Okta’s admin console — a must for an identity team managing IAM for such a large company. “Log-based or manual permissions audits for global and internal compliance standards are no longer necessary,” Schuchman reports.
Automatic anomaly and threat detection via ThreatInsight adds extra security by evaluating sign-in attempts for suspicious activity. In the past year, Okta has blocked over 900,000 credential-based attacks from more than 2,000 unique URLs.
Flexible authentication options and improved end-user experience
To accommodate the varied preferences of a global workforce, improve user experience, and boost adoption, Schuchman deployed Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication. As the Company enhances security protocols, Schuchman is encouraging the use of FastPass, a phishing-resistant authenticator that permits passwordless and biometric-based authentication.
Nearly 29,500 employees have already enrolled in FastPass, 22,600 of whom are regularly using it to authenticate. Because Okta can understand the IP address of a login attempt, biometric-based login is now used for team members working from pre-secured locations like warehouses and production facilities, further enhancing security.
In addition, the end-user experience has led Colgate-Palmolive’s individual business units to proactively request new apps be connected to Okta, aiding Schuchman’s efforts to fully centralize IAM and eliminate shadow IT.
“We now require all new apps we review to be compatible with Okta, and we rarely come across one that isn’t,” Schuchman notes.”
1,000 apps, one platform, seven years and counting…
Before implementing Okta seven years ago, the Company’s identity team handled just a dozen or so applications and wrangled multiple IAM systems. With Okta Workforce Identity, they now handle IAM from a single platform for more than 1,000 cloud and on-prem applications across all Colgate-Palmolive locations.
Schuchman credits a strong, ongoing relationship with the Okta Customer First team for keeping Colgate-Palmolive’s Okta installation at peak performance. “Okta understands our business goals and technology requirements, and conducts quarterly reviews of our product usage, so they’re able to offer suggestions on how to use existing features more efficiently and inform us about new features and future releases relevant to our use cases,” he says.
About Colgate-Palmolive
Colgate-Palmolive Company is a caring, innovative growth company that is reimagining a healthier future for all people, their pets and our planet. Focused on Oral Care, Personal Care, Home Care, and Pet Nutrition, it sells its products in more than 200 countries and territories under brands such as Colgate, Palmolive, elmex, hello, meridol, Sorriso, Tom’s of Maine, EltaMD, Filorga, Irish Spring, Lady Speed Stick, PCA SKIN, Protex, Sanex, Softsoap, Speed Stick, Ajax, Axion, Fabuloso, Murphy, Soupline and Suavitel, as well as Hill’s Science Diet and Hill’s Prescription Diet. The Company is recognized for its leadership and innovation in promoting sustainability and community wellbeing, including its achievements in decreasing plastic waste and promoting recyclability, saving water, conserving natural resources and improving children’s oral health through the Colgate Bright Smiles, Bright Futures program, which has reached approximately 1.8 billion children and their families since 1991. For more information about Colgate-Palmolive’s global business and how the Company is building a future to smile about, visit www.colgatepalmolive.com.
