RTL Nederland enhances security and convenience with Okta

RTL Nederland is a large Dutch media company with more than 1,200 employees and its head office in Hilversum. In an organisation that size, people work with a large number of applications every day. The more applications and users there are, the harder it gets to keep track of who has access to what, and to keep that access both secure and workable. That is what identity and access management is for: managing digital identities and their access to applications and data. RTL took this on together with FuseLogic, with Okta as the foundation.

Live in phases, within 30 days

FuseLogic rolled out Okta at RTL in phases. In the first phase the Okta portal was in place, connected to Office365 and to the existing onboarding and offboarding process that ran on Umra at RTL. In the phases that followed, the web applications were added, each one made accessible through Okta.

That order is no accident. We work to a fixed principle: think big, start small. Rather than spending months discussing one big end state, we get the first applications live within 30 days and build from there. Users see results quickly and the project stays manageable. We call this way of working identity management at the speed of business.

One portal with single sign-on

For users, one thing changed above all: logging in became simple. Single sign-on means you log in once and then reach all your connected applications, without typing a separate password for each one. One portal, one login.

That is not only more pleasant to work with. It also means fewer passwords to remember, and fewer password resets landing on the service desk.

Secured with multi-factor authentication

Convenience does not have to come at the cost of security. RTL combined single sign-on with multi-factor authentication (MFA): alongside a password, a second step is needed to log in, such as a confirmation through an app on your phone. Anyone with only a stolen password still gets nowhere.

Authentication runs through the source system. Control over who logs in sits in one central place, rather than scattered across separate applications. That benefited not just the users, but the security team as well.

Access that moves with onboarding and offboarding

One of the first connections was to the onboarding and offboarding process. That makes sense, because for many organisations that is where the biggest gains are.

When someone joins, changes role or leaves, their access has to move with them (in IT terms: joiner-mover-leaver). Do that by hand and it takes time, and there are almost always rights left open that no longer belong. Someone who can still reach everything on the Monday after they left is exactly the risk you want to avoid. By connecting the onboarding and offboarding process to Okta, access is granted and revoked largely automatically, at the moment it should be. Less manual work for IT and fewer open permissions that nobody is watching. That is the heart of identity and access management and identity governance.