One Technology, One Vision: Adecco Unifies Access Management Across Regions

The Adecco Group provides temporary staffing, permanent placement, career transition, as well as outsourcing and consulting to approximately 700,000 people worldwide.

Adecco had attempted Identity and Access Governance (IGA) implementation before, but not on a global scale. As the parent company of multiple brands spread across 60 countries, it needed to reduce disparate manual processes and replace localized legacy IAM solutions with one centralized system.

With Saviynt IGA, Adecco unified country-specific applications, reduced operational costs, improved the user experience, and reduced the risk of unauthorized access—across all regions.

Localized Systems Hindered Global Modernization

Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the Adecco Group is the world’s leading provider of workforce solutions. With 33,000 employees across 100 branches in 60 countries, the Fortune Global 500 company wanted to modernize its infrastructure and streamline diverse and localized business processes and systems into one unified technology.

In their existing architecture, Adecco had a multi-domain windows-centric environment with several different security tools—SIEMs, PAM tools, and authentication platforms. When employees, interns, and third parties needed access to applications hosted both internally and externally, access was managed differently in different regions. Some relied on manual processes, others used localized legacy IAM solutions. In addition, internal audits pointed to the need for greater attestation and access controls.

Adecco needed a technology vendor that could standardize and automate the management of enterprise users across its IT landscape, migrate existing data, bolster compliance, and help them achieve automated provisioning in Active Directory.

An Operational Revolution, Step by Step

To begin converging disparate systems around the globe, Adecco worked closely with the Saviynt team on a slow and steady approach to onboarding, beginning with only hundreds of users at a time. Good communication and humility were the driving philosophies of the collaboration, assuring that all local teams had solid training, a sense of ownership in the process, and understood the value of IGA.

Leveraging Saviynt’s out-of-the-box connectors, Adecco combed through multiple legacy components to successfully integrate four “crown jewel” apps in the cloud and on-prem, across all tech stacks and regions. This strategy helped Adecco achieve its top priority: move every branch and brand in lockstep toward a global mindset and away from coding and customizing locally.

What began with hundreds of users grew to 10,000 users globally, with more anticipated. Now, rather than siloed systems, the global staffing company has one centralized platform automating access reviews and requests across all regions, as well as role-based access and compliance reporting, and an SSO solution for internal users. 

Adecco reports that prior to Saviynt, local teams were reluctant to onboard IGA. Now, they’re asking to be placed in the front of the queue. This enthusiastic response heralds more collaboration on its IAM journey in both the short and long term. Moving forward, Adecco plans to expand beyond just business-critical applications to migrate thousands of production-related applications throughout the business. It aims to onboard 15 in Q3, 20 by the end of 2023, and 40 in 2024.