Bærum municipality streamlines access control with IAM DevOps

Bærum municipality streamlines access control with IAM DevOps

With Cloudworks IAM DevOps and the NetIQ platform from Micro Focus, Bærum municipality has efficient access control and IAM management.

Bærum kommune

 

Bærum municipality is a suburban municipality in Oslo and is located in Viken county. The municipality is Norway's fifth largest municipality by population. Their identity and access management is for 12,000 employees and 17,500 students.

Time-consuming manual processes

Like all municipalities, Bærum has a wide range of municipal services and businesses, which involves a very complicated access structure. The accesses for instance a secondary school teacher needs are completely different than for a nurse.

For Bærum municipality, this entailed enormous time-consuming manual processes, and it could take a long time from employees had their first day at work before all the necessary accesses were in place. There was a need to automate as much of the processes as possible, and streamline the rest.

Scarce access to expertise

The municipality had problems obtaining sufficient resources with the right expertise through traditional consulting contracts. With both some immediate needs that had to be solved in the short term, as well as the need for a more long-term strategy, the municipality needed a new delivery model.

Smoother management and more competence

The solution to the municipality's competence and strategy challenge was Cloudworks IAM DevOps. Instead of hiring specific consultants for an agreed time, the municipality has access to a larger, interdisciplinary team, where the various specialized resources contribute as needed.

Cloudworks IAM DevOps is based on the principle of flexible development, which involves dividing larger needs into smaller deliveries, with short and fast development runs. The development races are based on continuous priorities adapted to the company's development.

For Bærum municipality, this means semi-annual overall strategic goals, and with development runs of two weeks at a time. This gives a completely different flexibility than with long-term development processes, because every other week you can adjust priorities and focus if something else is burning. At the same time, it provides continuous and fast deliveries with concrete user value along the way.

 Skjermbilde 2022-02-01 kl. 09.39.18
Part of the team from the left: Ragnar Storstrøm, Martin Arne Steinmo, Anders Skjønhaug, Håvard Hattestad, Petter Fauske and Dagfinn Herum
 

Automated role-based access control

The DevOps team quickly got started delivering role-based access control with Micro Focus' NetIQ platform. By extracting as much information as possible from HR systems and other data sources about the new employee's role, workplace and start-up time, up to 80 per cent of the accesses are automatically allocated from day one.

To handle the accesses that can not be automated, employees get access to a portal where they can apply for the accesses they need. In the portal, there is a clear division of responsibilities in the form of an approval flow. In this way, managers and managers closest to the employee can ensure approval - instead of an IT department that does not have the prerequisites to know which accesses are actually needed.

Need for continuous management

The NetIQ platform from Micro Focus is very flexible, and can be completely adapted and adjusted according to the customer's needs. The platform is on-premise and is connected to the municipality's many older and heavy on-premise solutions.

Having such an infrastructure also increases the need for specialized and continuous follow-up and management, as well as access to immediate expertise when needed.

With Cloudworks' IAM DevOps methodology, Bærum municipality gets both the innovative and flexible development needs covered, as well as the stability and security of an efficient and specialized manager.

The article's main photo is taken by Camilla Wiik.