Business Situation
In 2005, the German government enacted the Energy Industry Act (EnWG) to ensure effective competition between energy suppliers. By implementing this amendment the Federal Government transferred the European Community Law for grid-bound energy supply to national law. It was necessary to segregate access to certain information between different parts of the Vattenfall organization. This required the implementation of stringent Identity and Access Management (IAM) processes supported by a system to enforce proper controls.

In addition to the Energy Industry Act, further provisions – such as the 8th EU Directive ("EuroSOX") – demanded even stricter documentation compliance strategies for Vattenfall Europe’s IT infrastructure. In particular, IT had to be set up so that all relevant data is available at any time and violations of any rules could be detected in advance.

Vattenfall Europe relied on the expertise of Avanade IT consultants to support the three-year project of introducing an integrated and consistently reliable Identity Management (IdM) across the entire group.

Solution
Avanade introduced Identity Management for the entire Windows environment, including Active Directory, Exchange and File Services. The solution included Omada’s OIM and Microsoft’s Identity Lifecycle Manager products. Vattenfall Europe quickly specified requirements for an IAM consulting company.

The Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager synchronized identity information across Vattenfall Europe’s IT environment, provisions user accounts and provides robust account data management. Simultaneously, Omada’s OIM product uses Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager to manage roles and enforce segregation of duties.

Results
IT managers at Vattenfall and Avanade were able to significantly reduce the time spent on identity management by harmonizing access management processes and enhancing the support of administrative tasks. Simultaneously processing times were considerably reduced for access rights application set-up.