One Identity keeps threats at bay for the University of Cyprus

[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Despo. I work as an IT systems administrator in the University of Cyprus. University of Cyprus is a public higher education institution focusing mostly on promotion of scholarship, education through teaching and research. And then enhancement of culture, social, and economic development of Cyprus. It's our goal to increase the security of our core IT infrastructure systems, applications, and endpoints, while also focusing on the user security awareness as well. We introduced an identity management system solution in University of Cyprus back in 2014, but the rapid growth and maturity of our environment drove us to towards looking for a convenient solution able to meet our needs because it was completely old solution and it needed a change. Our environment consists of many different types of users, sometimes even conflicting in nature. And this, along with extended permissions, granulation, segregated approval schemes led us to viewing One Identity more favorably. Our previous IAM solution was rigid, not flexible enough, and was severely lacking of automations. This had been keeping us behind on upgrading other systems which were connected with our solution, and also we couldn't connect any other systems easily or not at all. And One Identity was a significant change to that. It brought the change, actually. And now, we can easily maintain all this stuff and connect the systems like that. It's really in different solution. Benefits seen from this solution are plenty, like rapid decrease in request per user permissions, rapid increase in synchronization times regard to connected systems. We get lots of automations. And mind-blowing ease of crafting the various settings for our needs. Impressive reporting tools and impressive tools in general. We got the really decrease amount in regards to the calls of our service desk gets, especially for our so-called hybrid users in the university. Our organization introduced SAP long ago. It has since seen many changes and developments. However, due to various factors, there has been a significant deviation from SAP best practices, which, unfortunately, this has had an impact in our implementation for One Identity solution. We needed to find a lot of workarounds in order to work with SAP site, but we managed. Actually, not all of our identity in governance and administration capabilities are in cloud. We are in favor of keeping a more hybrid environment as long as our resources allow for it, but no, no cloud. Our users can be members of a set of number of categories. Those categories are usually coded in Active Directory or Azure-ending groups, through which the permissions are assigned to them. Usually usernames, passwords, email addresses, personnel IDs, positions, title, and the affiliation that is critical for us. At the moment, the application onboarding process goes like this. We begin by having a requirements meeting with the application owner. We discuss the requirements, the expectations, and then see what can be implemented and how. Application owners, for now, they don't have visibility on who has access to their application, but we want them to have. At the moment, we are in the application onboarding phase development, so they don't, but they will have to. Certification checks in One Identity's, one of the features that we really aspire to make use of it. Up until before One Identity, no such capability was in place. But still, since I told you we are in the implementation phase, we haven't been using that feature. Lesson learned for everybody who is concerning for this, don't overcomplicate things, keep things simple, and use best practices where possible. And get a good partner. And of course, One Identity. Reasons to deploy One Identity, there are plenty of automation, flexibility. Great overview, spherical view of accounts. Transparency, which is number one for us. Security. Virtually endless capabilities, of course. And also, we have been lucky enough to have [INAUDIBLE] data by our side on our development, which was a pivotal factor in the success of the project. One Identity Conference, this is my third time here. It's been an awesome experience meeting the developers of One Identity. It's an experience on its own. Added to that, meeting and holding great discussions with other partners, exchanging ideas. The invited guests are always so well-picked and spark interest with the topics they bring. And I always enjoy Patrick's speeches. And thank you again for such an event. [MUSIC PLAYING]