AGL Energy Enhances Business Agility, Empowers Staff and Boosts Compliance

“We have created a more agile business where personnel are empowered around access rights. We’ve made the working environment more flexible, giving people access to the applications they need, just when they need them, through Dell One Identity Manager.”

- Stephen Herman, IAM Initiative Project Manager, AGL Energy 

AGL Energy (AGL), one of Australia’s leading integrated energy companies, saw limitations in its IAM framework. It could take up to three days for a new starter to gain access to the applications they needed. Managers email the IT help desk with all the new starter’s requirements, and the help desk then raised multiple tickets, requesting support teams to manually provide access. Other change events, such as extensions to access rights or deactivation of user accounts, were just as time consuming. 

The company sent out a request for information to leading software vendors, including Quest. Based on the responses received, AGL created a short list of companies, which were then asked to respond to a request for proposal. Comments Herman, “We chose the Dell One Identity Manager solution because it is simpler to configure, and it integrated tightly with our Microsoft and SAP environments.” 

Herman explains, “A key strength of Dell One Identity Manager was its modularity and rich feature sets straight out of the box. The Dell solution required a smaller team of technical developers than in my previous experiences in deploying IAM solutions.” 

AGL has greater visibility and control over who has access to what applications – and has reduced the chance of people having permissions beyond their job roles. It has put security on a better footing, helping the company stay on the right side of auditors. Business units across AGL have seen how easy it is to progress change events. This in turn has prompted a rationalization exercise where managers are rethinking what applications their team members need access to. Herman says that AGL is boosting its security practice to further enhance security controls across the enterprise. 

“The great advantage we have now is visibility on roles and entitlements. It facilitates much better access governance across the business. We are mitigating risk with our Dell One Identity Manager solution and strengthening our security policies to maximize the overall performance of the company,” concludes Herman.