Telenet Group: Making secure access simple for 14,000 internal and external workers with Okta

To provide customers across Belgium with high-quality telco and entertainment services, the Telenet Group relies on more than 14,000 employees and external professionals, who all need access to the company’s infrastructure. Managing these identities in a secure, cost-efficient, and flexible way across multiple cloud and on-premises environments was increasingly difficult with the legacy access management solution.

Telenet worked with long-standing partner Upright Security to select the right AM solution based on three major criteria: security, manageability, and cost. Okta beat out the competition by delivering more powerful multi-tenancy capabilities, more control over security, and cost-efficient scalability thanks to its transparent subscription model and pre-build integrations.

With support from Upright Security, Telenet was able to implement Okta’s core features, such as Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication, quickly by using Okta's programmatically-built inbound federation IdP Discovery to connect Okta with the legacy stack. This enabled a gradual migration, onboarding all 14,000 users at their convenience, and allowed the team to migrate applications one by one (avoiding the need to code manually), whilst retiring their legacy solution and saving the associated upgrade, patching, infrastructure, service ops, integration, and license costs.

Okta’s Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication has made Telenet’s login processes more secure and convenient, allowing users to access internal apps remotely with their personal devices and verify their identity with Okta Verify. Deployment was easy across nine tenants, as Okta was able to immediately accomplish directory joins, and with centralised governance, Telenet’s IT team has more control over its diverse user base and can onboard new entities more quickly.

Ready to evolve alongside Okta, Telenet is constantly exploring new solutions to empower its workforce with added convenience, while adhering to the highest security standards. Beyond FastPass for passwordless logins, and Advanced Server Access to strengthen access control for external users, Telenet has started looking into Okta’s customer-facing initiatives as well.