General Motors streamlines identity and access controls
General Motors is an American multinational automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. Founded in 1908, it is the largest automaker in the United States and operates manufacturing plants in eight countries.
Challenge
As General Motors shifts to prioritize vehicle autonomy and electrification, ensuring their identity security program can securely enable their dynamic and modern distributed workforce has become critical.
Results
With SailPoint, General Motors has been able to streamline identity and access controls through a single platform, leveraging artificial intelligence and big data.
Since its founding in 1908, General Motors (GM) has endured tremendous change: two world wars, market globalization, and more technological transformation than during any previous century. Today, GM is undergoing its historic transformation as it works toward an automotive future that consists of zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.
With this vision, GM sees a future where it helps to save lives, enables a healthier planet, and provides customers the mobility they seek without having to spend hours in traffic. GM is executing on its “zero-zero-zero” future with its continued release of electric and intelligent automated vehicles.
GM’s focus on vehicle electrification and autotomy has created a distinct need for identity security. Effective identity management also proved crucial for GM when the pandemic forced the dramatic rise in remote work.
“As GM becomes even more software and technology-centric, managing who has access to what resources and services is crucial,” says GM’s Director of Identity and Access Management, Tray Wyman.
Wyman tells how GM wanted to not only streamline staff requests for access, such as when someone joins GM or changes the role of their job — but also modernize as much of the identity management process as possible. This would help the identity team to approve levels of access based on risk, minimize certification fatigue, leverage automation for all of their joiner, mover, leaver processes, and accommodate their increasingly remote workforce to ensure secure collaboration.
GM also sought to centralize its identity management efforts, which had previously been managed by various teams throughout the company.
We are focused on maximizing productivity through automation and using AI, so productivity and quality continue to improve.
Tray Wyman, Director of Identity & Access Management, General Motors
GM’s identity vision: zero trust, zero deficiencies and zero disruptions
To succeed in its identity plans, SailPoint CEO Mark McClain advised the team during a recent on-site visit to “not pave the cow paths” in their identity efforts but instead look where the team needed to be in the future and build the direct path necessary to get there.
And that, along with its partnership with SailPoint, is precisely what GM decided to do. As GM builds its Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions, Zero Congestion future, identity security, fueled by SailPoint, will be one of Zero Trust, Zero Deficiencies, and Zero Disruptions.
GM’s identity team had to grapple with excessive identity management complexity during the pandemic and the associated shift to remote work. As Wyman explains, GM quickly shifted from roughly 10% of its workforce working from home at any given time to well over 90%. That demands that the team launch and scale resources quickly, including redundant services for gateways and proxies, accelerate directory consolidations efforts, and leverage automation to enable those remote capabilities and secure access.
To meet those challenges and build efficiencies in the future, the GM identity team believes artificial intelligence and zero-trust risk-based decisions will improve their identity security and provide for a better user experience through more rapid access to the resources people need, and security levels will be more granularly enforced through risk-based decision-making. “At GM, we aim to earn customers for life, and you don’t do that by disappointing them,” Wyman says.
SailPoint is also helping the GM identity team define new policies that can be automated and closely align with its zero-trust cyber security initiative. “We are focused on maximizing productivity through automation and using AI, so productivity and quality continue to improve,” Wyman says.
Identity security proves central to GM’s global cybersecurity organization
The identity team has grown to become a more central and vital part of GM’s global cybersecurity organization. As all organizations within GM shift to prioritize autonomy and electrification, the role of identity and access management securely enables the dynamism of GM’s modern and distributed workforce.
SailPoint’s identity governance, powered by artificial intelligence and big data, helps automate access approvals based on actual risk, minimize certification fatigue, leverage automation around joiner, mover, leaver processes, and accommodate their increasingly remote workforce to ensure both collaboration and security.
SailPoint helped make that possible by providing GM a single identity security platform that tightly integrates the company’s personnel management, privileged identity management, and role-based access controls to support common capabilities such as password synchronization, automated joiner, mover, leaver events.
Taken together, all of this means the identity team can increase productivity and quality for all users so that GM can better focus on successfully delivering the products their customers love.
Industry
Manufacturing
Company Size
10,000+ employees
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