Air travel companies experience extreme seasonal loads, taking on thousands of short-term staff as demand increases, and then releasing them during the quieter months. For example, Trasavia hires an extra 400 staff each summer that all require access to business applications - whether systems for on-board merchandise sales or navigation tools - and each employee needs to be added to the company’s IT systems so they can do their jobs.
The Transavia service delivery team estimated that it deals with 1,500-2,000 changes in user roles each year. The manual cost in time required to make these changes historically proved to be a significant drain on resources.
“We used to provision user roles manually, but this took far too long — 10–15 minutes per user,” said Anders Kok, service delivery manager at Transavia. “We wanted to automate the whole process, so we spoke to One Identity.
“Active Roles was a great fit for our business,” continued Kok. “We now have user groups in Active Directory for cabin crew, cockpit, and technical maintenance, and all the information feeds in automatically from our HR system. When a new person starts, their mailbox is there, the account is there, and basic rights are all there. They can get working straightaway.”
But, he said, the big win is in quality improvement. “A manual process has a high error rate of 20-30 percent, whereas in the automated One Identity solution this is reduced to a minimum.”
Transavia has also been able to get support from One Identity through its transition to the cloud, augmenting its on-premises Active Directory deployment with the cloud-based Azure Active Directory.
“One Identity Active Roles is the ideal identity and access management solution to address the user lifecycle management challenges of Active Directory and Azure Active Directory that Transavia had faced,” said Jackson Shaw, vice president of product management at One Identity. “Active Roles allows Transavia to overcome the shortfalls of native tools and manual processes by using automation for the creation, modification, and removal of user accounts across the hybrid AD environment. This level of consistency, security, and efficiency is something that most organisations lack when relying on native tools.”
One Identity continues to act as a trusted advisor to Transavia, assisting with its user lifecycle challenges.
“We rely on the excellent advice from One Identity Services… One Identity knows our business and our idiosyncrasies, so we listen when it challenges our decisions,” concluded Kok.