Henning Christiansen - Driving Digital Expansion at Axel Springer while improving Cybersecurity through Identity & Access Management

Yeah, good afternoon. My name is he Stanson. I'm the CSO of pinger. And I would like to talk to you about, or introduce a little bit into the world of search pinger specifically with regards to the challenges in identity and access management. First of all, I do apologize by, I have to bore you with some details about Alinger this guy, you probably know it's Dr. Matthias, he's our CEO. And what he explains in this quotation is well, has been our, our strategy for quite a while to become the leading digital publisher. Yeah. We have 3.3 billion business at the moment ad of 560 million have 15,000 employees roughly, and do have 200 million unique visitors. What is specific about us and maybe what is also specific about the, the publishing business at the moment is that we are constantly losing, I would say competitive edge, not, not really competitive edge, but the print business is not really for the future.
This is something that we, we have to deal with. Just imagine eight years ago, something like this, we had like 4.7 million copies sold on a daily basis of the build tabloid. I don't know. I don't know how many people are really familiar with the build tabloid, but most people never admit that they've ever read a sample, but at least most people do know what, what is what it is about. And nowadays we are selling 2 million roughly, and this trend is, is not stopping. You can, maybe you can, you can slow it down to a certain extent, but it will increase like that. So what we did or specifically the board did in time, I would say is that we created, or we delved more into the digital business. So whatever, what you, what you've seen in the newspaper, maybe in the past is classified ads for instance, or, or marketing models and our board members, they early identified or anticipated that digital companies or internet companies would basically compensate the business that you had in your newspapers in the earlier days, and now via the internet.
And by doing this, and now I go back to the slides before we've been able to move our revenues and, and, and, and also the Abbot from the print business to our non-digital business, to the, to the, to the digital business nowadays, we are owning earning already. 70% of our Abbo is, is coming from the digital business. And digital business really means companies like step stones. It means companies like EDL or for price comparison, or Xanax as a, a performance marketer. This is what we are now making our money with, basically, no, really no, no, no significant change from the past, because this is also something that you've seen in the newspapers in earlier times, but nowadays parts of it had gone to have gone to the internet. And that is the way how we dealt with it. We are also trying to sell part of our journalistic content via the internet, but that is still a bit difficult.
People are being used to get this kind of content for free, and that's, it's really difficult and how to convince them that it's worthwhile paying for it. Okay. Identity and access management is actually what I would like. Yeah. What, what I like to talk to you about specifically in, in our environment, we have started an initiative quite some time ago. I would say two years, roughly and well, it's something that well connects. I would say to my, to the previous speaker, we are facing significant difficulties in convincing our board about the necessity of an identity and access management. It's more spending money than earning money. And this is usually not something that is highly difficult to present at the board level. So what we try to do is team up with an, all the necessary stakeholders in this context, it's not an it project. It's also GRC.
It's also finance. It's also HR, of course, it's personnel and jointly. We teamed up and identified existing. Well, we called them issues. And yeah, what you see here is I'm not going to read it out to you, is, is basically the summary of the most important issues that we had identified. And, and one of those issues was for instance, that we are not prepared or well prepared in our view for developments like cloud services, like office 365. At the moment, we can compensate our control deficiencies that we do have in our current identity and access management system, which is he genius, and which is consists of legacy of, of, of a lot of legacy components. We can compensate this by using badges. So when you, when, when, when you try to, when you have to come to, to our location, then you always have to have a badge and you have to show it.
And otherwise you will never be able to enter any room and you will never be able to connect any network, but with all the internet services cloud services coming up, this is no longer required. This, this kind of control com or deficiency compensation will no longer work in the future. And that was one of the arguments that we used to, to, to convince our board about the necessity of, of identity and access management. Another topic is the selling and also acquiring acquisition of, of companies. Usually three years ago, we sold a newspaper, two newspapers, roughly a thousand employees. And all of a sudden, basically overnight, we had to make sure that these, these, these people were so to speak removed from our network, their access rides were while they, they had to keep them to a keep them to a certain extent. But we had in a very, very short timeframe here to make sure that this is, this would be, would be working and this would work out. And that is something that you in principle are not really able to do, unless you want to spend a lot of effort manually. This is something where you need automatic support. And there are others that, you know, most likely from, from your own experiences like deficiency and security or low maturity of, of, of user lifecycle management, lack of automation, things like that. So we try to compile all that, summarize it and, and, and, and present it to the board and make sure that we get funding for the next step.
I'm not going into detail for sure not. I promise, but I already spoke about the genius and complex landscape of our legacy components that make up for our identity and access management. Well, I wouldn't call it that way, but it is what we do have at the moment. It's, it's really complex, it's highly manual. So there's a lot of effort involved. That was also one of the arguments that we had that we might calculate or try to calculate the business case to get funding for the, for the necessary project. And it is something that has been developed over the last 10 years. It's, there's, there's hardly any documentation, the people who have been developing it or setting it up while they are they're phasing out, they're leaving the company, they're retire. There is numerous really numerous issues and problems related to that.
And that, that is also one is another reason why, why we are going for that. What are the benefits? And again, I'm coming back to the, the point that I made earlier, we have teamed up with all the stakeholders that we have that we think are relevant. And that would basically benefit from such an identity and access management solution in our environment. And this really helps a lot to get them on board and to, to, to have them support you in any way. That is, that is something that is at least in, in my opinion, is something that you cannot do without something that we need to do. But still it's, it's, it's really, really difficult to explain to people who are not really familiar with the terms and who have other things to do on a daily basis to convince them and to explain to them what is an identity and access management solution. Whenever I do it, I feel that I tend to be technical, tend to poor people, tend to not to speak their language, do not really make sure that they are at the same level as I am. It's, it's really hard, a hard time to get those people on board and to get them to a level briefly that they understand what this is all about and why they should buy in. And that is actually why we have created a video, a brief animation that's yeah. I would like to show you,
Ay, at SOCR intensive Uber attack, I met met, I met external Vik for the, for S I of a spa, medium finance identity and access management courts. I am I central. I am,
Yeah. I should have warn you it's in German. Unfortunately, I was not able to translate it, but I hope the pictures speak for itself. And you were able to understand what is, what is meant by it, or what is the purpose of it. I would really love to hear your feedback or to have your feedback on that if not here on stage, but then maybe afterwards, but that's a good feedback. Thanks. But I have to admit that I do not regret any send that we spend on it. It was not really cheap. It was not really cheap, but I'm using it since two years. And I think it's, it's a great way. Maybe it's also something specific for the, for a media company or for publishers company. I don't know whether it would work in a bank or a financial institution, but however, I think it it's really worthwhile and to explain identity and access management within three minutes, I, I have not really come across a better way or I more practical way. Yeah. And that is basically I'm. I keep on time saving. That is, yeah, that, that would be the conclusion of my, of my presentation. Thank you for your intention.
Very interesting view. Can we have this, the questions, please? There you go. From which perspective are you driving your IM initiative? Is it technology it or business?
I try to make it business, but I, I cannot deny technology. I have to say, you have to, you have to have them both on board and you have to explain specifically to business what is in for them. There is a business case. If it's, if you cannot express it in money, then at least you can express this business case and time that can be used for better things and more valuable, more added value, bringing things than, than, yeah. Manual administration of user, of user rights, of access rights. This is something that is, that is far from being digital. And that is far from being what actually our strategy is. That is also a term I'm trying to try introduce every once in a while. But yeah, I think I'm, I try to do it both ways. What did you spend for the animation? Somehow? I expected this, as I said, I don't regret ascent that we spent. It was roughly six K. We didn't do it on our own. We had help of an agency, of course, the ideas and all the scenarios that were from, from us, from our team. But the, the animation as such was done by an agency. And as I said, six K is something that you, that you can calculate with. And if you contact
Can turn it through business case, look at the last question.
Yeah. Yeah. Probably you need to remove the branding, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue it's feasible. It's doable. Feel free to approach me I'm around tomorrow as well. And I guide
Inquiries directly to Mr. Carson during the break. Thank you so much again.
And that's one question. Ah, yes. Tool decision. We did make it a tool decision. We did do proof of concept and there was one winner.
Okay. Thank you so much. Thank.