BNP Paribas Bank Polska reduces cyber risk, increases automation

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With a nationwide footprint, BNP Paribas Bank Polska needed to ensure they had a robust IT infrastructure and a trustworthy identity security solution.

“Identity and rights management in a company with over 10,000 users is really challenging,” shares Paweł Mosurek, Identity and Access Management Manager at BNP Paribas Bank Polska. “The tool with which we design our IAM processes must be efficient and reliable. Having such a large number of employees who use hundreds of applications and systems and thousands of network IT resources makes it paramount for us to choose solutions ensuring that everything will work smoothly,” adds Paweł.

BNP Paribas Bank Polska faced many challenges related to integrating entities as a result of mergers. In the IAM area, this was a huge concern. There were operations on many application system identities, so they also needed the right tools to handle that amount of data and its interdependency.

“The world and technology are constantly progressing, revealing faults and shortcomings. New opportunities are also emerging. And it’s our job to keep up with this fast-paced world. Regulations sometimes can’t keep up, but we have to be ready, so once they are introduced, we can say: this is achievable in the time frame intended or already been implemented,” says Paweł.

Therefore, the Bank distinguished several key principles of their IAM program:

• Processes must be understandable and simple for the end-user.
• The system must not make work harder for people.
• IAM team’s job is to help users to make things work more efficiently, faster, and more conveniently. It shouldn’t be a complex process everyone will complain about and figure out how to get around.
• And most importantly, all the activities mentioned above must be safe too – as this is the primary goal of cybersecurity solutions.

SailPoint’s trusted partner for over a decade

Initially, BNP Paribas Bank Polska selected SailPoint as it held a top-ranked position as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Identity Governance and Administration report. “When we analyzed our needs, environment, and architecture, SailPoint seemed like a natural choice. It is a platform that fits well with our IT architecture. It is a very flexible product that can be adapted to our needs,” Paweł remembers.

By now, SailPoint has been a BNP Paribas Bank Polska trusted partner for over 10 years. During this time both the product and the approach to the IAM have significantly evolved. Nowadays, the company has reached such maturity in identity and access management that each of its employees identifies it with the processes and capabilities that SailPoint provides. “It’s a kind of natural evolution that we’ve gone through and continue to go through in order to achieve our goals, but without losing along the way something that’s very important today, namely cyber security,” says Paweł. “The priority for us was to at least maintain, and preferably increase, the level of security while simplifying and streamlining IAM processes,” he adds.

With such a large workforce, the diversity of its operations and the number of IT assets, BNP Paribas Bank Polska has good reasons to be proud of where they are today in their IAM journey. BNP Paribas Bank Polska currently manages approximately 600 production applications and 300 applications for test and development environments in SailPoint software.

These applications are built with approximately 120,000 managed individual rights. Paweł’s team also relies primarily on Microsoft Active Directory technology which according to Paweł, is the most appropriate technology for integrating and managing users and accesses from the SailPoint tools level. These applications are fundamental to SailPoint integration at the company: Active Directory, MS SQL, Lotus, I5OS (AS400), Connectors enabling management in the Cloud (Azure, IBM, GCP).

“Our processes are almost 100% automated, which is important because IAM is not just SailPoint. It’s also a multitude of other tasks performed by a small team of excellent specialists. But without automation, even they would not be able to cope with the scale we are facing. Fortunately, SailPoint and our integrator give us virtually endless possibilities for automation.” Paweł Mosurek, Identity and Access Management Manager, BNP Paribas Bank Polska

The number of requests generated by users per month averages about 800, of which 90% are executed automatically.

Automation at scale in fast-paced banking environment

Currently, in the Bank, the process of onboarding a new employee is fully automatic, and at the same time, within IAM processes, the time it takes to equip the user with access to the relevant systems and roles is less than one day. In most cases, an employee becomes active on day one. For IT department users, Paweł’s team creates additional domain accounts with different password policies and rights based on policies consistent with NIST best practices. The user can manage all this in a friendly and clear interface.

For several years now, BNP Paribas Bank Polska has been dynamically developing the area of certification of rights and access to IT systems.

Consider this: every employee of the organization is impacted by Identity Security. Every month, users perform about 4,000 resets and password changes using mechanisms embedded in SailPoint’s software. In the SailPoint tool, BNP Paribas Bank Polska has several connectors dedicated to their individual solutions. One connector is ensuring that users do not need to call the Helpdesk when they want to reset the password or enable or disable the application account.

The ability to automatically create different types of certification campaigns is vital to the overall business. “You already know the scale of our organization, and the fact is that there are two employees dedicated to the certification process who dedicate approximately 15% of their work time to this task. We perform manager certification for every employee and owner certification for approximately 400 IT assets per year,” shares Paweł.

Looking ahead

As Paweł looks ahead, Privileged Access Management (PAM) stands out as a priority for his team. The Bank is currently extending the capabilities of SailPoint by enhancing it with a PAM module for privileged access certification.

Paweł’s team has accumulated quite a lot of experiences and observations over the years in the area of rights and identity management. They’ve established some best practices:

• For each organization, exact IAM steps are likely to relate to specific needs and circumstances. Still, we can define some universal golden rules.
• Ready-made studies carried out by entities dealing with rights and identity issues, such as National Institute of Standards and Technology, have proven to be very helpful in defining such good practices.
• IAM and PAM should not be treated as a project, but rather as a program planned out and scheduled.
• It is not possible to implement everything at once. The expected maturity must be reached systematically step by step, along the way achieving milestones that should be clearly defined at the beginning of the program.
• Support and commitment of the senior management are vital. The signal must come from there that the IAM plan is in line with the company’s broader mission.
• Keeping in mind the end-users are crucial. As they are the ones who will be using the system the most, it needs to be user-friendly, natural, and helpful for them.

“And, of course, we need to remember that this is a security matter and be aware this is not for fun. Today, information is the most valuable asset in the world, and as such, it must be protected in a controlled manner,” says Paweł.