Sewan is a telecom operator that facilitates business telecommunications. Sewan offers telephony, Internet connection, hosting and security, all for professionals!
Sewan in figures :
- 775 employees
- 125,000 corporate customers
- 180 million in sales by 2022
- an IT team of 6 people, including one in Spain + a CISO
- 150 user movements per quarter (arrival, mobility, departure)
Their needs ;
- Monitor user flow
- Optimize and ensure the reliability of employee arrival and departure processes
"I wanted a solution that simply adapted to our needs without us having to adapt to the application. It's give and take: we're contributors to the platform's evolution."
Tony Chagnon CIO at Sewan
What was the problem at Sewan?
Against a backdrop of strong growth, there was a lot of movement (arrivals, mobility, departures) and it was becoming difficult to keep up with these flows using in-house resources.
It was also necessary to make the whole process, which was being carried out entirely by hand via an Excel file, more reliable.
One person managed these flows without really having established a process, or formalized the actions, so that when he left, it was difficult to take over the file.
Tony Chagnon, CIO, newly arrived at Sewan, decided to optimize these flows.
The 2 alternatives mentioned are :
- manage this project in-house
or
- manage this project with Microsoft tools
Internally, this means creating a tool from scratch. This requires specific development and a lot of resources, so the idea is quickly abandoned.
Tony turned to Microsoft, except that all the Microsoft tools worked well together for identity management, but there were major weaknesses in the third-party tools, which were not all connected to Microsoft, particularly for the on-premise part.
Tony Chagnon decided to take a look at what was available on the market.
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Why choose Youzer as your IAM solution?
After realizing that developing an in-house tool or centralizing everything on Microsoft wasn't working, Tony Chagnon decided to take a look at what was available on the market, and quickly discovered a number of solutions, including Youzer.
With the exception of Youzer, none of these solutions are suited to the needs of a company of Sewan's size. The solutions are aimed at large players and offer projects that take a long time to set up.
"It was a lot more complicated to set up when we needed something fast enough.
I got in touch with Youzer afterwards. We did a POC for a month, to see if it would work for us, and now we've been using Youzer for three years."
Tony wanted to automate user accounts and of course be able to connect all his tools without any technical constraints.
It was an evolving application, and that's what interested me.
I didn't want to have a fixed structure that wouldn't necessarily meet our needs. I wanted a solution that would adapt to customer needs, rather than us having to adapt to the application.
Tony Chagnon
What Tony really appreciated was Youzer's flexibility, as the application regularly evolves in line with customer needs.
In terms of pricing, the decision was quickly made: "The trick was quite simple: the time wasted creating accounts left and right, compared with the cost of automation, was saved directly."
How did Youzer fit into their processes?
Sewan had Eurecia as its HRIS, and all HR and non-HR users were managed on a single solution. As a result, they didn't have the difficulty of consolidating several HR sources.
Initially, a few applications were connected to Youzer, such as Eurecia, Active Directory and Microsoft 365.
The arrival of Youzer within the teams was well received, but we had to rework the processes a little so that everything went through Youzer, and thus have good practices.
We had to think about what was going to be kept and what integration schedule was going to be put in place.
Generally speaking, I have a team who are always quite keen on this kind of tool, and in the end, it caught on quite quickly, and they found it quite user-friendly. Knowing that creating users is normally a rather tedious task, they always do the same thing, and there to bring a bit of novelty, a bit of "fun" in the creation, was rather welcome too.
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What was the first feedback from Youzer?
What's obvious when you synchronize the first connectors is: this account should be deactivated because this person has left!
We had a few little surprises, but not many, so that means we were managing things correctly. We did have a few, though, so it helped to make the information more reliable.
At Sewan, user profiles are the basis of good user management. The IT team therefore immediately adopted the packages, which enable user rights profiles to be finely defined for each application.
If the profile is correctly set up, there are no nasty surprises.
At first, the packages were a bit complicated to set up, since this functionality was shaped with Youzer and Sewan's needs in mind.
Secondly, alignments were used extensively. These are used to check that the applications assigned to a user correspond to that person's workstation.
What are your favourite features?
- packages = for reliability
- alignments = for safety
What have Youzer's benefits been?
With 120 mobilizations per quarter, Sewan needed a solution to automate the tracking of user movements in order to make their IS more reliable and secure. Youzer was a great help in this area.
After testing the synchronization of the three main connectors (AD, 365 and Eurecia), Sewan quickly connected several other tools such as GLPI, a ticketing tool developed locally on a VM, Meraki, Asana, Gitlab... and all the tools could be linked to Youzer either with dedicated connectors, or with a universal connector that connects via an agent or with a self-service connector, which is a manual connector.
It's difficult to put a figure on the benefits that Youzer has brought to Sewan, but the satisfaction of our teams and employees proves that Youzer is well integrated into the company.
What's more, Youzer has evolved a great deal, and Sewan wants to use more of the bricks in this IAM solution, which is why other projects are under consideration, notably on IT inventory management and on the security side with the review of authorizations.
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Would you recommend Youzer?
Tony appreciates Youzer's approach, which mixes automation with user and account management, while retaining a user-friendly aspect.
"Whether for SMEs or ETIs, it's always interesting to make all this [identity and access management] more reliable, and it helps departments that don't have dedicated IT structures to help manage all the tools they have on their premises.Yes, I'd highly recommend it."
"With the proliferation of everything we can do, of all the accesses, not everyone knows or can master all that. If we can have a tool that allows us to do that, that's ideal."
