Mazars is a world leading audit, accounting and consulting group with more than 17,000 employees in 77 countries. As a large, globally distributed organization, it is crucial that Mazars is able to provide an IT environment which is able to support and encourage collaboration across all of its territories. With the wider adoption of cloud services, including Office 365, Mazars’ traditional, on-premise approach to identity management was no longer able to provide a solution.

Mazars’ needed a solution which would provide a unified authentication framework and a seamless single sign-on experience for its users, regardless of user location or type of application. The solution would need to be able to work with Mazars’ global authentication environment, hiding the complexity of multiple directories from end-users. Furthermore, the system would need to have a small technical footprint in order to make deployment across all 77 territories viable.

ProofID worked with Mazars to deploy a solution based upon PingFederate, the industry leading federated single sign-on platform. PingFederate’s enterprise features and adherence to standards meant that a single resilient cluster deployed in Mazars’ Azure tenancy was able to provide federated authentication and single sign-on for all of Mazars’ users across all tenancies. Delivered under ProofID’s methodology driven IAM Managed Service framework, the rollout has been streamlined to the extent that a new territory can be integrated within a matter of a few hours; currently the solution has been extended to 35+ territories, allowing those users single sign-on to Mazars’ core applications, both SaaS and on-premise.

The solution is enhanced by ProofID’s White Pages application, which uses directory aggregation and user provisioning technology to provide a single staff user directory, which can be used to locate and contact colleagues from across the global Mazars family, significantly enhancing cross-territory productivity. The built-in user self-service capabilities ensure that user data is kept up to date and accurate.

Mazars chose to work with ProofID as its outsourced managed service provider for the expert advice and cost savings it is able to make over the three-year period of the contract. To hire a team internally to do the same job would be expensive, as well as being a hard skill set to find.

Jayson Dudley, Group CISO, Mazars explains:
“Mazars is a complex organization and has moved to take advantage of cloud-based services such as Office 365 to foster better collaboration and sense of community to what is a highly distributed workforce. Given this move our existing identity management service was no longer fit for purpose. Working with ProofID we have rapidly rolled out a new security framework that allows us to integrate new applications and services at pace. The service is transformational for the organization.”

Tom Eggleston, CEO, ProofID said: “We are proud to have been able to help Mazars on this journey, which shows how ProofID’s IAM Managed Service approach can underpin transformational technical changes, ensuring the organization gets the outcome needed, when it’s needed.”