45 Apps. Zero Audit Trail. Three Weeks to Fix It.
How a 450-person scaleup went from manual provisioning and no SSO to fully automated identity governance before a potential acquirer started asking questions.
At a Glance
The Problem
The entire identity layer ran through Google Workspace. There was no SSO, and 45 applications each managed their own access. When someone joined, a person built their account by hand. When someone left, their access stayed live until the right person remembered to remove it.
Nobody had a reliable picture of who held access to what, or from where.
What Was Actually at Risk
An ex-employee still active in a production app. A 45-application estate with nothing resembling an audit trail, right as a potential acquirer starts asking questions.
For a company at this stage, with acquisition conversations already in play, those things don't surface as technical debt. They surface as deal risk.
How We Did It
Okta was deployed via Terraform and mapped into the existing Google Workspace OU structure, keeping the directory intact and avoiding migration overhead. Nobody woke up to a broken login. Each of the 45 applications was onboarded individually, with permission layers documented and governed as they came in rather than retrofitted after the fact.
HiBob was then connected as the HR source of truth so that employment changes (new starters, role changes, departures) flow directly through to access and app entitlements. That removed the tickets, the manual handoffs, and the gaps between someone leaving and their access actually being revoked.
The Result
Three weeks of engineering and the entire access lifecycle is automated. HR makes a change in HiBob and the rest follows: right access on arrival, clean exit on departure. The ticket queue that used to fill with access requests cleared, and IT got their time back for project delivery. The estate went from invisible to governed.
“We went from having no visibility over who had access to what, to a position where everything flows from a single HR change. The difference was immediate.”— Head of IT (name withheld by request)
By the Numbers
This Might Sound Familiar
If your company has grown past the point where one person can keep track of who has access to what, but you haven't yet built the infrastructure to replace that person's memory, you're in the same position this company was three weeks before we started.
Learn more about our iam & access management servicesWe also brought their device estate under management as part of this engagement.
Read that case studyYou'll talk to the engineer who does the work, not a sales team.