You’ve seen those iconic blue containers filled with everything from cars to TVs and stamped with the Maersk logo countless times on ships docked at ports around the world. But have you ever thought about what it takes to orchestrate the movement of that cargo?
Maersk operates in 134 countries, shipping 10 million containers to 76 global ports annually with the help of 88,000 employees. A complex network of people and systems are responsible for its safe passage. Take a car battery. You can’t put a battery into a shipping container and simply say goodbye. A battery is considered dangerous cargo. It goes into a specialized climate-controlled container, requires special customs clearance, and must follow specific logistics to safely transport the batteries over land. And Maersk must keep every vendor, partner and customer updated during each point of the journey. As Maersk’s Angel Donchev, vice president of Platform Tech Lead - Web, Mobile, API/EDI, Blockchain, says, “Maersk is a fascinating company.”
To reduce the complexity of these operations, streamline processes and keep its various constituents happy, Maersk is leveraging a hybrid identity and access management (IAM) and cloud strategy with identity serving as a “pivotal role,” according to Angel. In fact, he says, “The more adoption you have around the cloud, the more identity becomes critical for you because you need to authenticate services, users, partners, vendors and all kinds of different personas, as well as connected devices.”
Since embarking on this hybrid IAM and cloud strategy, Maersk is experiencing numerous benefits. The company has shortened authentication time by a factor of four, so customers, partners and vendors can quickly access essential information through any digital channel in less than a millisecond. The organization has also decreased onboarding time for new vendors from months to less than a week. Lastly, Maersk has reduced costs for Angel’s massive department by 45%, while at the same time increasing the engineering capacity by 45%.
Check out this video to hear more about how Maersk’s hybrid IAM and cloud strategy is helping the company achieve its goal of becoming the leading global integrator of containers and logistics.