“The selection of Idaptive was a strategic one, squarely focused on increasing our flexibility. But the ability to reduce our costs through the displacement of adjacent products can’t be overstated.” Sébastien Huet, Chief Technology Officer, Rémy Cointreau
Created by a 1991 merger between two globally recognized brands, Rémy Cointreau is a French alcoholic beverage company that produces cognac, liqueurs and spirits. The company is headquartered in Paris and offers a range of exclusive brands at the top end of the market.
THE CHALLENGE
Drive flexibility across the business. Deliver employees single sign-on access to all the apps they need, located in one central portal. Ease the onboarding process and increase productivity for all users.
When Chief Technology Officer Sébastien Huet joined Rémy Cointreau in 2015, one of his primary objectives was to help transform the company into a more agile organization. A key component of that transition would be the upgrade of it’s IT infrastructure to provide more flexibility, respond better to changing worker habits and deliver exceptional support for the business.
“I joined Rémy Cointreau before we used Idaptive, and it took me weeks to get access to all the applications I needed,” says Huet. “If that were the case across the company, we’d have serious efficiency issues — our employees access 20 applications a day, on average. It was clear that productivity was not being optimized.”
Huet encountered another example underscoring the need for an overhaul. “It took months to open our new office in Asia,” he says. “One of our key objectives is to have the flexibility to open a new office anywhere in the world in a matter of days.”
Huet and his team set out to transform IT and with it, the business as a whole. “The company was moving to a cloud-based architecture, with the goal of relying exclusively on web apps,” he says. “We wanted to be able to access apps from any device, anywhere and at any time, so mobile management was crucial. And for optimal security, we needed to transfer focus from the network and the device to the applications. Identity management would be essential to achieving these goals.”
Rémy initiated a search for an identity management solution that would secure application access, dramatically simplify user provisioning and the onboarding of new employees, help to ease the build-out of new corporate offices and provide a central portal where users could access all the resources they needed from one place.
THE SOLUTION
Rémy’s strategic selection of Idaptive was based on increasing company agility, but the solution’s mobility management and multi-factor authentication capabilities would play a key role in reducing costs.
Despite yearly revenue of over a billion Euros, Rémy is a relatively small company in a large, extremely competitive market. It is essential that the company leverage technology to its advantage. “With an IT team of 50 people supporting the entire worldwide organization, we need highly effective solutions that are easy to deploy and easy to maintain for the local IT teams,” says Huet.
Technologies need to be simple and easily accessed for the business user as well. Forgotten passwords, password resets, and account lockouts and reactivations were a problem for Rémy IT, responsible for 30 percent of all help desk tickets. With the industry average cost of a help desk call running anywhere from $25 to $30, these calls not only usurped valuable IT time and negatively impacted productivity, but they also cost the company real money.
“Rémy previously had a single sign-on solution but it was only available in French and suffered from a number of support barriers,” says Huet. “Adding new apps through that system was expensive, and that helped us to build a business case for why we should transition to Idaptive. But Idaptive wasn’t a financial decision, it was a strategic decision based on the agility it would deliver the company.”
THE RESULTS
The company is now significantly more flexible. Users are on-boarded quickly and productivity has improved. The strain on IT has been removed through simplified provisioning, reduced help desk tickets and a reduced number of products to manage.
One of the key goals in Rémy’s cloud transformation project was to ensure users could access anything from a mobile device that they could access from their laptops — in the same easy way. “We have many cloud apps from many different vendors and Idaptive provides a portal through which users can get access to all those applications with a click or tap, from any device. In effect, it ties all the apps together and gives them the feel of one large, unified solution.”
Since implementation, Idaptive has simplified the onboarding of new employees and has driven increases in productivity. “New employees are productive more quickly after joining the company and easier access has made existing employees more efficient as well,” says Huet.
Early on, the company hadn’t planned to move its enterprise mobility management to Idaptive. However, during implementation, the team evaluated its functionality and decided to move forward with the consolidated solution. “We were already using a mobile device management product prior to Idaptive, but it made sense to consolidate all identity management in one place, especially since it would alleviate further pressure from IT with one less product to manage, and save on the costs of a separate security solution.”
Rémy is looking forward to implementing Idaptive’s multi-factor authentication next. “For the same reasons, it makes sense to leverage the Idaptive solution to the furthest degree possible,” he says. “The selection of Idaptive was a strategic one, squarely focused on increasing our flexibility. But the ability to reduce our costs through the displacement of adjacent products can’t be overstated.”
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