Joakim Hardell: Cloud Strategy vs. National Security. Telia's Road to IGA Systems Modernization

Yes. Thank you.

I, I started a little, I am service manager for workforce identity, government and administration. And I have worked with identity and access management in various shapes and forms for over 20 years. I'd like to management. Also my teammates who are joining this call it's we have the service owner, Martin also the, who is the project manager for our road to the future. And we have Robert and Fredic who are architects and developers and our tours, who is the application manager. So this is a team effort, something quick about Telia. If you don't know about the company, it's the biggest telecom.

One of the world's most connected regions, as we say in Sweden, it is also the oldest telecom operator. And we have our main market in six countries, Norway, Sweden, fin Finmark Estonia, and Lisa Romania, and also some quick facts about the Telia workforce, IGA in our IGA systems, we have 38,000 personal identities personal into this meaning employees, contractors, well people basically we have 10,000 functional accounts. We have 1900 it systems to which you can request access. We have 25,000 different accesses defined.

And in the year 2 20 20, we have 300,000 access request process in the IGA system. And what we're doing this year in 2021 is that we are working on the IGA replacement. We are moving from one product to another. We need to migrate everything. And we also need to take into account new national contingency regulations.

And those, because we are providing some services, which are considered sensitive to the country. And if we begin with the IGA replacement, the first phase here, we have a go live in the end of Q2, 2021.

So, and in phase one, we are basically focusing on maintaining the as situation. We need to create the same integrations that the current IGA solution has, which means that we need to receive HR master data. We need to receive the data from the application repository. We need to provision to the directory services and we need to provision to the financial systems. And in the go live, the main focus is avoid to break anything. And the in the second phase of this project is when we're actually taking advantage of having a new IGA system, which is more modern.

This means that we can have direct integrations to more applications. We can have more reconciliation read back from the target systems. We can provide more granular access control to the various components of each application or system. We can automate much of the access, right reviews, which the system owners currently need to do manually. We can provide increased stability. And then we have the M C S P I G. And what is that?

Well, as I mentioned previously, it stands for national contingency security platform. IGA, like I mentioned, Telia is working in six different countries. Some of these are members of the NATO. Some are not, some are members of the European union, some are not. So we have a challenge in like price scenario, where we have a borders cut situation, and this is something that we need to be prepared for, although we hope it is never going to happen.

So if we look at the current setup and the inter relations between the systems on a higher level, we have a cloud placed HR system, which feeds data into the IGA system. We have an application repository based on prem, which is feeding data to the IGA system. And we have the directory services, which we're provisioning tool. And also have some feedback from, with a new IGA system. We'll have a new integration to the cloud directory, and we're also going to need to set up integrations to the per country, national contingency security platform.

It systems, this is still on very conceptual level. It's not mean implemented, but this is what we need to do to meet future security requirements. And to show you the picture, a still very conceptual picture of the setup that we need to have, what we need to do is to secure the access control and the autonomy. And this is something that we need to uphold. We need to be able to run, run operations for 90 days, even if the borders are cut and the wires are cut between the counties.

So on the left side, we have the central common services and that's pretty much the setup that we would have this year, but available to all countries, we have an application repository and an information model, which is feeds the policy repository. And you, then you can enable policy based access controlled P D a C. We have the HR system, which feeds into the IGA. And then we have provisioning to, to various systems. We have the IM systems, physical access to buildings, cloud services, financial systems, and directory services.

And on the right side, we have the per country set up where we need to set up a, of the IGA system. We have, we need to have a replica of the direct, the local of the directory services to be able to provide physical access and local accesses for people working in those countries. So this is going to be a challenge clearly, and the requirements are specified are that N CS P it covers more than just the identity governance and administration area. And the reason that we are doing this is actually that we need to have new legislation.

And this goes against much of what's driven by globalization and the cloud trend, the solution here, it must meet the demands, but 90 days of fully autonomous operations, our approach is to work with identities on a shared corporate platform, and then distribute them to local directories using dynamic policies. And those are driven by the local demands. And the question to the audience here, because we're stating here the few seem to have realized how affected we are by the consequences of the cloud wave.

I think this has been mentioned in earlier presentation here, but it would be very interesting for us to know if there are any other companies facing similar challenges.