Exostar provides a trusted platform for business partner collaboration in highly regulated industries, offering solutions specifically designed to address the complexities of collaboration across supply and value chains. With a presence in 175 countries globally, Exostar provides secure access to over 200,000 organizations in industries such as aerospace, defense, banking and pharmaceuticals.

Today’s businesses rely on multitiered ecosystems of suppliers, partners and other third parties to operate successfully. This collaboration requires business leaders to open third-party access to their organization’s sensitive internal data and systems. As businesses grow and evolve, the governance and administration processes for managing large volumes of identities become increasingly time-consuming and complex, and they face ongoing risks of identity-based cyberattacks and regulatory challenges.

Exostar recognized the need for robust and efficient governance as part of its Access: One identity and access management platform. Using this platform, Exostar customers can streamline and automate access management processes, reduce the risks associated with opening access to third parties and protect their assets from compromise.

Exostar partnered with IBM to address the complexities of third-party access governance and administration in highly regulated industries. To overcome this challenge, Exostar implemented IBM® Verify Identity Governance to extend the services provided by Access: One, governing fine-grained access permissions across on-premises and cloud environments.

IBM Verify Identity Governance provided the capability to aggregate and correlate disparate identity and access rights, transforming them into business-driven policies that are easy to interpret and manage. Integrated with Access: One, the solution delivered a full-feature identity governance infrastructure designed around business requirements rather than IT constraints, helping ensure greater flexibility and control.

Exostar selected IBM Verify Identity Governance due to its breadth of capability and ease of integration. In particular, the ability to create a bidirectional brokerage adapter simplified the process of interrogating the identity data from Access: One through the analysis and modelling capabilities of IBM Verify Identity Governance. Exostar and IBM teamed together to implement the solution, with Exostar leveraging the fine-grained identity governance capabilities of IBM Verify to deliver a differentiated solution to market.

With predictive and prescriptive analytics, IBM Verify Identity Governance enhanced Access: One with deeper identity insights, including machine learning support for adaptive analysis, entitlement and risk scoring that optimized governance outcomes. The business activity-based approach of IBM Verify Identity Governance redefined separation of duty (SoD) modelling, shifting from traditional role-to-role comparisons to a more effective and compliance-driven framework. Exostar utilized the REST APIs of IBM Verify to facilitate deeper integration and governance expansion across Exostar’s ecosystem of customers.

As a result, Exostar can onboard business partners and suppliers with Access: One in minutes, providing federated single sign-on for partners and suppliers while enabling business partners to administer their own users through delegated administration. And it can all be done with business-focused interfaces that translate complex permissions into easy-to-understand business rules. Delivered in partnership with IBM, the Access: One and IBM Verify Identity Governance solutions provide unmatched visibility into access rights, privileges and activity throughout supply chains, strengthening security while centralizing control under one unified governance framework.

By implementing IBM Verify Identity Governance, Exostar has realized significant benefits, including the translation of over 10,000 entitlements, permissions and attributes into a few hundred business roles, reducing certification and compliance-related activities from months to a few weeks. Partner users are now onboarded and provisioned access to critical applications in under 4 hours, down from 5 days previously.

In addition, by using the automation capabilities of IBM Verify Identity Governance, Exostar has reduced business risk through automated account adoption and removal of orphaned accounts, representing approximately 15% of active accounts.

Exostar has been able to drive new levels of efficiency for their customers with a reduction in service desk ticket volumes of over 35%. These reductions related to password reset and account unlock requests, freeing agents to focus on more complex queries.

As Exostar continues to grow and expand its services, the company remains committed to further leverage IBM Verify to enhance its identity and access management capabilities.

Exostar (link resides outside of ibm.com) provides a trusted platform for business partner collaboration in highly regulated industries, offering solutions to address the complexities of collaboration across supply and value chains. Founded in 2000, Exostar has grown to become a leading provider of identity and access management solutions with a strong focus on security, compliance and risk mitigation. It’s headquartered in the United States, with offices in India, the United Kingdom and Australia.