Multiple legacy identity systems. Over a hundred external applications accessed by a fragmented user base. Tens of millions of customer and partner identities—and growing daily.

This was the situation HP Inc. found themselves in recently. The company famous for creating customer-facing technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere, needed to implement an identity ecosystem that made technology on the back end better as well. With the help of Ping Identity and Accenture, HP looked to create a unified identity management ecosystem across the enterprise that would boost the customer experience by serving up a 360-degree view of their HP interactions.

The result was the identity ecosystem that powers the new HP Identity, or HP ID, program. HP ID now engages customers and partners around the world from the cloud, in a secure, highly available environment.

Secure and Seamless Access to Customer Resources
In making the move away from disjointed customer experiences and costly management burdens, HP faced several challenges:

1. Siloed data. Over the years HP had deployed more than 70 identity systems throughout the organization. These legacy systems did not interact smoothly with one another, and siloed data meant customers could not easily access the resources they needed.
2. Regional regulations. Every minute of every day, HP delivers more than a thousand devices and consumables to customers worldwide—and has to abide by the rules and regulations in each of those markets. The laws and requirements restricting how data is stored or how it is allowed to be transferred among systems varies by country, and HP must be confident that it fully complies with those regulations.
3. Massive scale. The company needed to migrate more than a hundred applications, including HP Shopping, HP Partner First Portal, ePrint and more, in the largest identity initiative they had ever undertaken. This entailed a significant number of concurrent work streams and dependencies, and therefore any delay would have unwanted ripple effects down the line.
4. Uptime requirements. Because this was primarily a customer-facing project, HP needed to ensure a smooth transition or risk driving away consumers to their competitors. The company’s goal was 99.95% uptime, with zero planned downtime allowed.
    

Ping Identity and Access Management
The CTO and IT organizations teamed with Ping to create a centralized single sign-on (SSO) service with a common user interface flow based on standards. This allowed for a smooth customer and partner log-in experience, and gave end users the option of using Facebook or Google social login for authentication.

In addition, the HP, Accenture and Ping professional services partnered on a fully automated, multi-region deployment in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Components included:

• PingDirectory, which stores more than 150 million existing identities, with around 40,000 new identities added per day. It also has a feature for synchronizing customer data across distributed environments on both premises and in the cloud.
• PingDataGovernance, which allows for centralized policies that govern access to entire customer profiles or specific attributes to meet privacy regulations and more.
   

Today, HP has a single identity and access management (IAM) platform deployed across the entire organization. To learn more about how HP reduced complexity, optimized spend and is enabling new business as the company evolves, please read our case study, "HP Engages Customers via Unified Ecosystem."