Open Communication: How Idaptive Helped 74-Year Old Multimedia Conglomerate Morris Communications Get Lighter, Faster, and More Secure
Password management and stronger control over sensitive documents – while saving time and money – are propelling the media brand into the next decade and beyond.
Navigating the current media landscape demands that you be nimble, frugal, and tirelessly adaptable. Even if you’re a multimedia conglomerate like Morris Communications, which has been in the business since the 1940s and boasts more than 6,000 employees across magazine publishing, outdoor advertising, book publishing, and online services. You need to stay one step ahead in a media industry that voraciously consumes data while struggling to maintain balance as the ground constantly shifts under its feet.
With the help of Idaptive, the Georgia-based communications company – which publishes daily newspapers like St. Augustine Record in St. Augustine, Florida and the Amarillo Globe-News in Amarillo, Texas, and magazines such as Alaska Magazine and Equine Journal – has been able to alleviate managerial headaches and improve its employee user experience, all the while improving its security. It’s no easy feat when you consider not just the size of the company, but the diversity of location and job function among its 6,000 plus employees. Their unique problems required solutions that were both effective and cost-efficient, while keeping implementation complexity to a minimum. From removing password burdens to improving usability of frequently-accessed apps, Morris Communications found Idaptive to be more than up for the challenge.
UnBoxing
The first point of focus for Morris Communications was Box.com, an app the company relied on heavily for storing and sharing documents across their geographically dispersed workforce. Naturally, the mass adoption of Box.com across its offices required the purchase of hundreds of user licenses, while opening up massive amounts of vulnerabilities as each new password was set and reset.
Arup Chakraborty, Solution Architect at NIIT Technologies (the company contracted by Morris Communications to handle its IT services), immediately identified the problem. “They store user passwords and identities in their own database in the cloud, but because Morris was storing critical information in Box.com, we felt that from a general security perspective it was better to store associated user identity information on our local servers.” To manage all of these accounts, Chakraborty and his team began researching comprehensive single sign-on options. When Morris eventually switched from Box.com to Office 365 for document sharing and storage, the perfect opportunity to implement a new support system presented itself.
Security and Savings
Once Morris Communications made the decision to transition to Office 365, their internal teams began evaluating support system solutions. Some of the options available required additional hardware, manpower, and other resources that were simply not cost efficient and did nothing to alleviate their concerns about complexity – in fact, they only exacerbated it. Chakraborty’s NIIT Technologies team estimated that these other systems would take weeks to implement, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and would require the addition of specially-trained internal administrators. It was, in short, everything they were looking to avoid.
Enter Idaptive, with a solution that was the exact opposite of what NIIT Technologies had been seeing elsewhere. “We found that no additional hardware would be required, little administration would be necessary after the rollout, and implementation could be completed in about four hours,” says Chakraborty. “The Idaptive platform manages itself. I don’t have to update it, I don’t have to upgrade it. And I never have to worry about degradation of service.”
Not only was the ability to instantly drop users and reassign licenses a much-needed security buttress, but it also had an immediate financial impact. By Morris Communications’ estimates, they were paying close to $180,000 a year on Box.com licenses that were not being used, by employees that no longer required such access. Idaptive allows Morris Communications to instantly identify and manage these licenses so this kind of wastefulness is avoided. Not having to set up individual accounts increased the ease of the overall user experience for Morris Communications employees, kept them from having to remember (and potential lose) multiple passwords, and took the heavy “password reset” burden off the shoulders of the IT department. The ripple effect was immediate, and immediately felt.
Idaptive was everything Morris Communications needed it to be – instant, financially sound, and easily managed. Perfect for a media company that needs to be nimble to ‘scoop’ the competition.
For more on Morris Communications, visit here.
Raman Kumar
Raman Kumar is Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Idaptive. In this role, he is responsible for all of Idaptive’s customer-facing functions, including technical support, professional services, education, customer success management, and subscription management.
Before joining the Idaptive team, Raman spent more than seven years with Centrify, starting as Sr. Director of Customer Success, and eventually spending the last three-and-a-half years there as Vice President of that function. Prior to Centrify, Raman was Director of Customer Success with GuardianEdge, where he led the global technical support operation supporting 2,000 customers. Following Symantec’s acquisition of GuardianEdge, he also worked closely with the M&A integration team to integrate his Technical Support organization into the Symantec Enterprise Support Organization. Earlier in his career, Raman held technical support and IT positions with Teneros Inc., and with eGain Communications. High customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS) ratings have followed Raman in all of his professional experiences.
Raman holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics & Communications from Manipal Academy of Higher Education.
CHAMELEON-LIKE SUPERPOWER
If Raman could have any Chameleon-like superpower, it would be “Zen mode”. “Zen mode would be helpful in any role, but especially in Customer Success, when you’re dealing with so many different functions serving the customer. Ommmmmmmm…”