Solutions at-a-Glance
18,000+ employees and partners can now access multiple applications from any device with a single set of credentials.
Single sign-on (SSO) implementation reduced login-related helpdesk issues without business disruption or downtime.
Federated identity simplifies access management, while providing granular and centralised control over authentication policies.
Standards support provides seamless integration with existing and new applications, whether on-premises, cloud or SaaS.
Canon Streamlines Access With Enterprise-wide Single Sign-on
THE OBJECTIVE
Headquartered in the UK, Canon Europe is a subsidiary of Canon Inc. of Japan, a leading innovator and provider of imaging solutions that was founded in 1937. Canon Europe contributes around one-third of Canon’s global sales revenue and employs approximately 18,000 people across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Canon needed to provide their workforce users with secure and seamless access to roughly 15 line-of-business applications. Many of these disparate applications required discrete user access processes. Managing them was not only creating complexity for Canon’s IT team, but it was also increasing the potential for security weaknesses and productivity loss.
THE CHALLENGE
As part of their Unity project—a digital transformation initiative centered on establishing high-profile business processes supported by appropriate IT systems—Canon is building a hybrid architecture of on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications. They needed a federated approach to identity and access management (IAM) to provide flexibility, security and simplified management.
They also wanted to implement enterprise-wide single-sign on (SSO). But they needed a solution that could integrate seamlessly with Oracle E-Business Suite, which is being used for procurement, manufacturing and logistics, as well as comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) requirements, including policy enforcement, risk assessment and compliance auditing.
THE SOLUTION
Canon Europe evaluated several single sign-on solutions, ultimately selecting PingFederate because of its powerful feature set, support for diverse access requirements and seamless integration across Canon’s broad application set. PingFed’s ability to extend SSO capabilities to Oracle EBS through simple adapters and agents allows for a modular approach to identity federation and streamlines integration with other Canon systems and SaaS applications.
Canon’s employees and partners now have secure access to portals, SaaS applications and third-party systems from any device using a single set of login credentials. Using PingFed’s policy-driven adaptive authentication, Canon is aggregating user and device context data to centralise control over authentication and SSO. They’re also able to leverage third-party authentication sources and multiple authentication options—depending on user and device context—to dynamically discover a user’s identity provider. By building granular rules for user authentication and access, Canon is able to meet the security, governance and compliance requirements of a multinational corporation.
“Flexibility is important to us,” explains Nitesh Saini, Canon’s IT Product Manager for Identity Management. “PingFederate can support modern and legacy applications across a wide range of authentication methods. For example, our current Oracle EBS implementation doesn’t support the SAML standard, but the PingFederate adaptor made it simple for us to deliver SSO for EBS across the entire enterprise alongside all of our other applications.”
THE RESULTS
Canon is providing over 18,000 employees and partners with seamless single sign-on to applications. The Canon team now has a powerful and simple-to-manage solution that provides granular levels of security across a diverse range of applications. Canon’s IT support teams have seen a reduction in login-related service desk requests, while their senior IT administrators benefit from improved tools for managing changes to access rights. The PingFed implementation also improved transparency with no negative impact on uptime or disruption to the business.
More About Canon
Canon is a global provider of digital imaging technologies. Founded in Japan in 1937, we employ over 198,000 people in marketing and manufacturing facilities across Japan, the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania.
Learn more at www.canon-europe.com.
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