Best Buy powers peak season with seamless identity security

The challenge: managing identity at scale during retail's busiest season

For a retail giant like Best Buy, the holiday shopping season represents a critical period of intense activity. This includes "Power Week," the five-day shopping period running from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, which brings a massive influx of customer traffic and sales. To meet this demand, Best Buy expands its workforce by approximately 20% each year, onboarding thousands of seasonal employees in October and November.

This annual surge creates significant operational challenges. The company needs to seamlessly provision access for new and returning seasonal hires, ensuring they are productive from day one. At the same time, the existing identity infrastructure must handle a dramatic increase in login authentications from the entire workforce.

In the past, Best Buy relied on a mix of legacy technologies which made managing these cyclical identity demands complex and prone to friction. The process of onboarding, offboarding, and handling rehires was not as smooth as it needed to be. This resulted in rocky moments, increased help desk tickets, and potential disruptions that could divert focus from the core mission: serving customers. Best Buy requires a modern, scalable identity solution that can automate processes, handle extreme peak loads without issue, and seamlessly support the business.

The solution: a unified, enterprise-class identity platform

To modernize its identity and access management program, Best Buy executed a major strategic transition, moving to an integrated platform powered by SailPoint, Ping Identity, and Microsoft Active Directory. This new identity portfolio replaced the previous fragmented, legacy environment with a unified, enterprise-class system.

The cutover was a significant undertaking, involving the simultaneous launch of a new HR system (Workday) alongside SailPoint. This powerful combination allowed Best Buy to streamline and automate the entire identity lifecycle for its approximately 100,000 employees, plus an equivalent number of non-human service accounts and external vendor partners.

With SailPoint, Best Buy could automate access provisioning for new hires, making it easy for retail managers to get seasonal staff the precise access they needed instantly. The platform also simplified the unique workflows for rehires—the many employees who return for the holiday season year after year. By smoothing out the friction associated with onboarding, MFA device registration, and access assignments, the new solution empowered the retail teams to focus on sales and customer satisfaction instead of troubleshooting IT issues.

The results: record-breaking performance with unprecedented stability

The implementation of the SailPoint-powered identity platform delivered immediate and impactful results, particularly during the high-stakes Power Week. On Black Friday alone, Best Buy’s systems processed 6 million employee authentication events—a 150% increase over the typical daily average of 4 million. Across the entire five-day Power Week, the daily authentication load consistently ran 118% of the normal volume. The new identity infrastructure handled this massive surge flawlessly.

"The success was so seamless that it went virtually unnoticed by the business, which is the ultimate goal of any foundational technology,” said Greg Handrick, Director of IAM at Best Buy. Key results include:

• Frictionless onboarding and offboarding: The process for managing thousands of seasonal hires—from onboarding in the fall to offboarding in January—became smooth and efficient. Rehire workflows were specifically refined, eliminating previous pain points.
• Drastic reduction in help desk tickets: Following the full implementation, the number of IAM-related help desk tickets from retail employees dropped precipitously. The stability and reliability of the system meant employees could simply log in and work without issues.
• Increased productivity and employee satisfaction: With access readily available and system performance never in question, retail employees were more productive and experienced less frustration. Greg noted, "System access became completely invisible, allowing the business to focus on what’s most important: engaging and delighting customers.”
• Comprehensive governance: The platform provides a unified view of all identity types—including full-time employees, seasonal staff, contractors, vendors, and non-human accounts—ensuring security and control across the entire organization.
• Reduced IAM staff burden:The IAM team experienced a significant reduction in workload, making this Power Week the most seamless and stress-free in years—if not ever. They maintained a watchful eye on the monitoring dashboards but were otherwise able to continue their regular routines without disruption.

By modernizing its identity strategy with SailPoint, Best Buy not only weathered its busiest season but set a new standard for operational excellence. Greg reflected, “The story was that there was no story: the system just worked, even under record-breaking load.”