No. 1 Hospital System in Georgia Modernizes Its Identity Security
Ecosystem in the Cloud

Overview:
A major academic healthcare system in the southeastern United States, known for its integration of research, education, and patient care.

Headquarters:
Southeast United States

Industry:
Healthcare

Saviynt Identity Cloud Capabilities:

• Identity Governance & Administration (IGA)

Modernizing Identity and Eliminating Legacy Burden

One of the largest and most reputable academic health systems in the United States was at a turning point. As the no. 1 regional hospital in Georgia and ranking in the top 10% in cancer care nationwide, the growing organization needed to modernize its identity ecosystem to ensure that every member of the diverse community it serves could have frictionless access to the applications and services they needed to work, learn, heal, or advance the progress of medical science. With extensive technical debt and an ever-expanding user base with varied, fast-changing needs, this wouldn’t be easy. But it was imperative to move quickly to eliminate administrative burden and licensing costs for outdated software.

Balancing Innovation and Security

Dedicated to innovative medicine, teaching the caregivers of the future, and supporting patient needs, this leading academic health system is guided by a deep commitment to providing innovative care. A similar mission—to deliver exceptional user experiences that make it easy for people from all walks of life to access key resources—motivates the organization’s technology and security teams.

With more than 100,000 end users—including undergraduate and graduate students, healthcare providers, medical and nursing students, and enrollees in community-based continuing education programs—this university-based health system needs to serve a large and enormously diverse community. Some are digital natives, while others are more comfortable with fax machines and textbooks. But all of them live in a world where consumer expectations for digital experiences continue to climb, driven by the likes of Apple and Amazon.

Security leaders were determined to meet this high bar while maintaining the organization’s uncompromising commitment to patient privacy and information security. Their challenge was compounded by the organization’s reliance on legacy technologies, which added to the administrative burden. Wanting to move to the cloud to take full advantage of centralization, automation, and streamlined workflows, and with software licenses coming up for renewal, stakeholders realized it was time to make a change.

Unifying A Complex Environment in Six Months

After choosing Saviynt, the security team launched an accelerated deployment process. It took just over six months, and incorporated four initial application integrations, including Epic and the organization’s core HR platform. Leveraging pre-built connectors made it possible to move faster, as did the platform’s low-code configurability. Strong partnerships between Saviynt, internal team members, and a third-party integrator helped, too. 

Nonetheless, the project—which involved consolidating two different identity systems on a single platform—was complex. The size of the environment added to the challenge, as did the health system’s extensive technical debt. Despite the aggressive timeline, the project will be completed on schedule.

By adopting a comprehensive platform approach, the healthcare organization is becoming able to simplify and streamline workflows in identity governance, privileged access management, and cloud security—all in one place. This will enable automation and the elimination of many manual processes, so that teams can focus their attention on more important aspects of the identity ecosystem, like user experience.

Building a Future-Ready Identity Program

The Saviynt Identity Cloud is making it possible for the health system to consolidate all identities across its environment on a single cloud platform. With greater visibility into identities and access rights in real time, the organization’s security team will be able to self-audit on a regular basis, so that they can engage in ongoing modernization of their identity program and build a culture of continuous improvement.

Most importantly, the implementation will serve as a foundation that the security team can build upon for the long run, first by implementing role-based access controls (RBAC) and then privileged access management (PAM).

Employees are already benefitting from the new solution. It’s faster for new users to obtain access rights, while security practitioners have better visibility across all identities in the ecosystem, along with streamlined audit-readiness. The health system is saving money by not renewing downstream contracts at the same time that it’s creating new workflow efficiencies.