Less than a decade ago, the IT world was still relatively clear-cut, at least in the IBM sphere. Experts tended to refer to the mainframe as a closed system. In the meantime, the IT landscape in large companies has become much more complex. A wide variety of tools from the Windows and Unix/Linux world connect with classic mainframe applications. On top of that, cloud technologies are also being integrated more and more. For example, Hapag-Lloyd started to rely increasingly on cloud-based systems via Microsoft Azure or AWS in 2019, and the logistics company also introduced Salesforce.

“Without a central IAM system, such a complex heterogeneous landscape is practically no longer manageable,” Josep Cardona from the Identity and Access Management IT department at Hapag-Lloyd AG says with conviction. That’s why the transport and logistics company headquartered in Hamburg introduced the identity and access management (IAM) solution from Beta Systems Software AG in 2014 to support end-to-end user lifecycle processes. The solution was introduced and implemented with the help of a Beta Systems partner.

Up until then, Hapag-Lloyd handled rights assignment in an electronic form-based system. Requests for authorizations were transmitted to the administrators of the individual application systems from this system. In other words, provisioning was performed completely manually, with zero feedback from the applications, no live tracking and no central control or reporting functions. There were also no automated workflows, so everyone had to know, or find out, whom they had to send their request to. Finally, the whole method was lacking a role concept. Authorizations were controlled via reference users, a process that always comes with compliance risks.