Mazars outsources access management

Global accountancy firm Mazars has outsourced the management of access to Oracle and Sharepoint applications for 6000 global staff.

The company uses Novell’s Access Manage and Identity Manager products to provide secure access to systems such as its ERP and Sharepoint.

Mazars, which has 13,000 workers in about 70 countries, selected UK-based Salford Software when its French service provider became too expensive.

Without internal resources, Mazars relies on an identity management service provider to make changes or add links to other systems. Jayson Dudley, group infrastructure manager at Mazars, said it was becoming expensive to make changes: “Whenever we wanted to do something there was a charge associated with it.”

Salford Software is providing a managed service and Mazars expects to save hundreds of thousands of pounds. The supplier will manage, monitor and maintain the system from the UK while providing Mazars with incident and problem resolution and management via a help desk. It provides staff with a single identity and sign-on across the company and provisions or de-provisions access based upon a person's role within the organisation.

Dudley said if the company did the work itself it would probably require one full-time staff member and additional ad hoc contractors.

Mazar’s Novell systems are hosted in Paris by NTT.