Enabling Consolidation and a Flexible Application Structure Within a Rapidly Growing Business

Bonnier News – part of the Bonnier AB holding company – is one of Sweden’s leading media houses. Its brands, including Dagens Nyheter, Dagens industri, Expressen, Lifestyle, HD-Sydsvenskan and Bonnier Business Media, reach over three million readers every day. Bonnier News brings together the Bonnier-owned newspapers and companies with adjacent business areas. In 2018, this media house generated revenues of SEK 7 billion (USD 780 million).

Challenges
In 2015, Bonnier News was a holding company operating a handful of newspapers. Since that time, it has grown immensely through acquisitions that doubled its workforce to 3,000 employees. Acquisitions come with systems and services and rapid changes, making it hard to keep track of Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Complicating matters even more was the company’s reliance on Microsoft Active Directory. Enabling access for all users meant Bonnier’s IT group had to integrate all of the acquired company’s infrastructure – a very time-intensive process. In the meantime, IT was forced to run manual scripts to verify who should be provisioned and users had to manually access each app. Combined, these issues slowed collaboration across the expanded company.

Bonnier News’ IT group realized it needed a better way to administer and control application access. “We wanted to consolidate while keeping our application structure as flexible as possible,” explains Johan Blomgren, IT Solution Manager for Bonnier News.

Solutions
After evaluating OneLogin, Okta and other IAM solution providers, the IT group selected OneLogin for its solution functionality and the company’s responsiveness. The technology team was impressed with the ability to easily integrate with a range of applications in a discrete fashion, easing the transition during acquisitions. They also appreciated the ability to automatically provision and deprovision application access – and even automatically enable entire departments to access applications – since that lowers IT workload.

According to Blomgren, “From the start, we trusted OneLogin. They were easy to work with and offered a solution that covered all our essential technical and business needs at a competitive price.”

Results
Today, Bonnier News maintains about 5,400 accounts and 50+ apps through OneLogin. The company takes advantage of OneLogin to enable user lifecycle management and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for its apps. The IT group can connect all apps through OneLogin and enable MFA to ensure only active accounts – employees and contractors – can access the applications. “Since we work with newspapers and journalists, we are a major target for hacks so we must secure our apps. From day one, our users have used MFA for all application access,” continues Blomgren.

Bonnier News migrated 15 apps off Azure Active Directory to OneLogin and stopped using about 250 apps. As Blomgren says, “It makes no sense to maintain two systems for our IAM so we are standardizing on OneLogin while consolidating our app library. It’s really easy to move apps from other systems to OneLogin.”

Since adopting OneLogin, IT has seen a significant reduction in support calls for password resets and login problems. “Because users don’t need to remember and reset passwords for every application, our IT department is free to focus on developing more of value,” Blomgren says.

Going forward, Bonnier News is making OneLogin the enabler for its Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) approach. “Our goal is to build identity through OneLogin to different services and both SaaS and on-premise apps, making OneLogin the heart of our IDaaS strategy,” concludes Blomgren.

Why OneLogin?
OneLogin brings speed and integrity to the modern enterprise with an award-winning single sign-on and identity management platform. Our portfolio of solutions secure connections across all users, all devices and every application, helping enterprises drive new levels of business integrity and operational velocity across their entire app portfolios.