Flex strengthens supply chain with IAM

Companies that depend on vast supply chains to produce their wares tend to work with hundreds or even thousands of partners, many of which require an online portal — or several — with which to share information. Flex, the $26 billion supply chain technology company formerly known as Flextronics, is no exception.

That presented a challenge for Flex CIO Gus Shahin in 2015, who the last few years has beefed up the company’s cybersecurity profile while accelerating business productivity. On that score, Shahin realized he needed an identity and access management (IAM) solution that enabled the company’s 200,000 employees, as well as its 17,000 suppliers, to communicate and connect to on-premises and cloud applications, which Flex was increasingly adding to its IT portfolio. “Everybody wants their products on the shelves faster,” Shahin says.

The case for easy single sign-on

But the IAM solution needed to be super secure, as hackers were increasingly targeting global companies through their third-party partners. Witness Target, whose defenses were penetrated by hackers who entered through an HVAC supplier, as Exhibit A.

Flex had long used portals to communicate with its employees and supply chain partners, but managing churn from both cohorts — provisioning and deprovisioning access to pools of ever coming and going people — proved challenging with the company’s inconsistent approach to IAM. For example, if partners didn’t access a portal for 30 days or more, they had re-authenticate to regain access.

Flex required a centralized solution from which to manage user access, which Shahin found in Okta, a cloud software maker specializing in single sign-on services. Okta enabled Flex’s partners to re-authenticate via self-service, reducing Flex’s help-desk support tickets, says Shahin.

“I liked where the company was heading,” says Shahin, of Okta’s architecture and strategy roadmaps. “It had the right culture and people.”

The IAM market has gained traction as the password continues its death march, giving way to single sign-on solutions, soft tokens and biometrics. Enterprises view IAM as core competency for digital businesses hoping to establish trust between businesses, people and things, while helping to fend off adversaries hungry for data that isn’t theirs. Done properly, IAM also helps reduce friction between companies, partners and customers.

By 2022, IAM-as-a-service will be the chosen delivery model for more than 80 percent of new access management purchases, up from 50 percent today, Gartner says. From 20th Century Fox to Experian to Flex and dozens of other leading enterprises, Okta has become the go-to solution for single sign-on IAM.

With Okta as the gateway to Flex’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, Flex workers gain access to their Workday information, Box files and ServiceNow access from their smartphones. Moreover, Okta regularly integrates other cloud services that Flex uses, or plans to use. Flex has also worked with Okta to expand the company’s mobile capabilities and other features on the roadmap.

Shahin allows that when he began the Okta rollout in 2016, he was initially worried that the software wouldn’t cover Flex’s scale, which, spanning 100-plus factories in more than 35 countries, made the company among Okta’s largest customers. And there were some hiccups to work through. Shahin recalls having to roll back an integration of Okta with Microsoft Office 365 one weekend after engineers spotted performance issues. Today, Okta is humming along at Flex. “You don’t have to remember passwords,” Shahin says. “It makes life so much easier.”

IAM paves the way for ML, SDN

Having checked the box on secure single sign-on, Shahin is looking at using machine learning (ML) and data analytics to help supply chain, operations and finance staff make better business decisions. He is experimenting with or evaluating technologies from Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, as well as working with startups.

“We are way down that path,” Shahin says. “It’s about figuring out a way to extract the data, and once you get it, decode it.”

For example, ML and analytics initiatives are also supporting Flex Pulse Center, where Shahin’s staff receives real-time alerts about geopolitical events, factory updates, weather alerts and other factors that impact the company’s global supply chain and operations.

Shahin is also rearchitecting Flex’s network as a software-defined network (SDN), which will reduce latency across the company’s factories and supply chain and enable the company to better connect to cloud vendors. Software-defined factories will enable Flex to conduct preventive maintenance on its machines, Shahin says.

Shahin says that Flex frequently ports data and applications to the cloud, including Microsoft Azure and AWS, and vice versa in a hybrid environment. But, he adds, “until our SDN is completely rolled out, we get better performance if we put it on-premises.”