UMRA Readies Salford City Council for Audit Requirements

Salford City is about 200 miles North West of London. It covers 37 square miles and the five districts of Salford, Eccles, Worsley, Irlam and Cadishead, and Swinton and Pendlebury. Some 220,000 people are proud to call Salford their home. At Salford City Council 10,000 employees are working on enhancing and supporting individuals, their families and their communities within the city, as well as developing and boosting the city’s economic base. Bert Williams, Network Infrastructure Specialist talks about the need to introduce a new solution for user management: “In 2004 we moved all users to one active directory domain. We used databases and VB scripts, which not only were error prone but also, because of the many manual actions, took ages. We needed a more robust, flexible and accessible process to manage this migration. With the volume of changes we have, such as new accounts and removals, and our complex user name generation, we decided to use the mass import feature of Tools4ever’s UMRA.” This is a simple solution for making complex modifications to an Active Directory and network in bulk. It allows for importing, updating, and deleting user accounts en mass via a single process based on a CSV file or the current Active Directory groups.

Mass Import to Active Directory

The migration proved to be far from an easy project as it became clear the domain contained inaccurate data. As a result of creating users manually, multiple errors appeared, such as phone numbers formatted incorrectly, and no consistency in generating user names and passwords. Additionally there was no audit trail recording changes to users’ network accounts through their full life cycle. Besides the mass import feature Stalford decided to implement UMRA Helpdesk Delegation with forms to delegate user management tasks to non technical staff and UMRA Automation to synchronize information across all systems in the network.

Bert Williams: “We started the UMRA project ourselves and quickly found that the projects were complex. But the support from Tools4ever UK was exceptional and we quickly gained an understanding of UMRA and its power and flexibility.”

Data Consistency

Salford City Council’s user account management process is now done in a secure and streamlined environment. User network account data is always consistent with Council’s naming conventions and password complexity rules. Any changes to user accounts are logged and reports generated to support future auditing and compliance requirements.

Audit Issues

Salford City Council creates 25 to 30 new accounts per week. Since the introduction of UMRA a new user account now is created in minutes, confirmed via email and the action logged for auditing. Previously this had been a ‘paper’ process taking up to 24 hours to complete. Accounts could be created incorrectly, resulting in increased administration and user frustration. The significant saving in time immediately reduced costs in user account provisioning and future auditing compliance. Due to the historic lack of logging, Salford knew they would have huge audit issues. Bert Williams: “Currently we are not audited, but it’s on the cards for the future. As we now have UMRA in place, it will not be a challenge to meet audit requirements.

Future Plans

Alongside UMRA Salford City Council has now rolled out Tools4ever’s Self Service Reset Password Management (SSRPM). In the near future Bert Williams’ department is considering more of Tools4ever’s Identity & Access Management solutions, such as Single Sign-On (E-SSOM). UMRA capability will be enhanced by managing SAP user life cycles and password resets alongside Active Directory.

“UMRA did exactly what it said and what I expected. I couldn’t find any other solution as flexible with the support we needed to get going.”