The Auto Club Group Identity Modernization: A Catalyst for Business Transformation to Infinite Possibility

Overview:
As the second largest AAA club in North America, the Auto Club Group offers roadside assistance, insurance, travel support, and other services to more than 13 million AAA members.

Headquarters:
Dearborn, MI

Industry:
Insurance/automotive services

Cloud Infrastructure:
AWS, Azure

Saviynt Identity Cloud Capabilities:

• Identity Governance & Administration (IGA)

A Strategic Shift Toward Zero Downtime and Digital Agility

Like the national AAA federation, to which it belongs, ACG is dedicated to advancing traffic safety, enhancing mobility, and delivering trusted services. For this reason, the Auto Club Group strives to keep critical technology systems up and running so that members can rely on AAA services during times of distress. To achieve its zero-downtime objective, the company recognized the need to evolve beyond its legacy on-premises identity management system. Transitioning to a modern, cloud-based identity governance solution would enable greater reliability and cost optimization, giving the business a strategic advantage. It would also drive innovation and agility while supporting the key business objective of digital transformation.

A Foundation for Scalable, Secure Growth

When AAA members need help, they know they can count on their local AAA club. AAA is an international federation of regional auto clubs located across North America. Committed to the safety, security, and peace of mind of its members, AAA offers insurance, travel services like 24-hour roadside assistance and emergency towing, and information for travelers such as recommendations, maps, and guides, as well as other forms of assistance.

“Our mission is to assist our members in their moments of need,” says Jeyanth Jambunathan, Senior Director of Identity and Access Management at the Auto Club Group. “To deliver on this, we require reliable, resilient, and intelligent systems that empower our employees to help our members. It’s imperative to ensure seamless, automated access for our associates at critical moments, enabling them to provide the highest level of service to our members.”

The Auto Club Group grew into the second-largest federation of AAA clubs in North America primarily through acquisition. Although individual clubs are bound by AAA-wide rules and standards, each has its own tools and processes for managing digital identities. This means that every acquired entity can bring different systems, processes, and workflows that must be integrated into the Auto Club Group’s technology landscape. Standardizing in the cloud would make this easier, reducing operational overhead while supporting consistent employee experiences and regulatory compliance.

The Auto Club Group was facing increasing challenges with its legacy on-premises identity management system. Frequent outages and performance issues hindered the organization’s ability to reliably achieve operational objectives. Time-consuming manual processes were burdensome for IT and administrative teams, while rising maintenance costs strained resources. Even minor system enhancements required significant developer effort and often took more than a week to implement.

Adding to the complexity, the Auto Club Group manages a diverse and dynamic workforce that includes not only employees, contractors, and vendors, but also individuals who transition between roles—such as contract-to-hire scenarios. Each role has distinct and evolving access requirements, making identity governance particularly challenging. To continue delivering high-quality services to its members while operating more efficiently, the organization needed a modern, scalable Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution.

After a market scan and in-depth comparative analysis of competing vendors in the IGA space, the Auto Club Group invited two Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders to each deliver a proof-of-value. It quickly became clear that Saviynt was best aligned with the company’s needs and objectives.

Modernizing Identity Without Disruption

“Whenever we implement innovative new technologies, we also look at how we are transforming our existing legacy products and services to continue to meet the needs of our members in an ever-changing digital world,” says Jambunathan.

To ensure a seamless transition, the Auto Club Group’s identity team implemented an innovative approach by deploying Saviynt IGA in parallel with the existing legacy system, while designating the legacy platform as a downstream application within Saviynt. The first step was integrating Saviynt with the organization’s system of record, Workday, and automating birthright provisioning for Microsoft Active Directory, email, and low-risk LDAP-based applications.

Almost immediately, end users enjoyed the rich user interface, streamlined workflows, and self-service certification capabilities. Automated provisioning drastically reduced the team’s manual workload, freeing up valuable IT resources while accelerating user onboarding.

By migrating applications incrementally, the team minimized disruption to end users and gathered valuable feedback so they could refine processes along the way. Within a year, all critical applications had been successfully onboarded to Saviynt, allowing the Auto Club Group to fully decommission its legacy identity platform. Saviynt’s low-code configurability made it possible to build access provisioning processes that meet the needs of employees, managers, and IT administrators, even when these needs are complex or rapidly changing.

Resilience, Efficiency, and Strategic Agility

The transition to Saviynt IGA delivered significant improvements to security, efficiency, and user experience. Saviynt’s modern cloud architecture increased system availability, supporting the Auto Club Group’s goal of zero downtime and high responsiveness to member needs. With centralized identity governance, the organization gained greater visibility and control over access, ensuring, as Jambunathan puts it, that “the right people have the right access at the right time.”

“Because we’re in the insurance industry, we’re heavily regulated,” Jambunathan says. “Generating evidence for audits has become very easy, because the auditor has direct access to the Saviynt platform. Reporting and querying are nearly effortless, and audit preparation processes that used to take us two to three months can now be completed in less than two weeks.”

As an insurance-based business, the Auto Club Group has wise risk management deeply engrained in its culture. The identity team leverages Saviynt’s intelligent recommendations to help set fine-grained policies to restrict permissions to the bare minimum, adhering to least-privileged access principles even for managing access to the IGA tool itself. Future plans include increasing reliance on automation, implementing role mining to streamline permission management and adding segregation of duties (SoD) capabilities.

With Saviynt IGA fully deployed, the Auto Club Group is now well positioned to scale its identity program in step with business growth and digital transformation. Looking forward, the organization is exploring managing Non-Human Identities (NHIs) and implementing AI-based use cases within its identity ecosystem.

AI-driven identity analytics will enable proactive detection of anomalous access patterns and policy violations before they become risks. Machine learning models can recommend appropriate access rights based on peer group behavior, reducing overprovisioning and streamlining access request fulfillment. Plus, intelligent automation can optimize certification campaigns by prioritizing high-risk entitlements for review, improving both compliance and efficiency.

“Modernizing our identity platform with Saviynt has been a game-changer. We’ve significantly improved our security posture, reduced operational overhead, and positioned ourselves to leverage AI and automation for smarter, faster decisions.
Most importantly, we’re better equipped to support our employees, and ultimately our members, when it matters most,” Jambunathan says.