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Vox Media & Lumos
Enabling Employees Get Access to Apps They Need through Self-Service.
Summary
Vox Media is the leading modern media company. They are on a mission to inspire essential conversations about what’s now, what’s next, and what’s possible. When it came time to improve their internal IT practices and get better control over SaaS app management, Mark Jaques, Vox Media’s Director of Information Security, turned to Lumos.
“Support folks were getting burned out by doing the busy work of provisioning access to apps again and again. In a remote world without personal interaction, this gets very monotonous. Lumos helped us alleviate this. Lumos automates access requests and still logs everything in our ITSM. This raised the team morale! We're able to focus more on strategy as opposed to making sure things are working.”
Company Overview
Vox Media is the leading modern media company. Their editorial networks include some of the most famous brand across digital, TV and print — Vulture, The Verge, SB Nation, ...
The Challenge
You don’t become the leading modern media company by standing still. Vox Media has been growing - fast. And along with that growth, many app purchases were made with a “get it done” mentality. This led to SaaS sprawl that the Vox Media IT team wanted to address. Especially, with the recent acquisition of Group Nine Media with 500+ employees, it became key to make onboarding to apps as easy as possible, while keeping the company secure and cost-efficient.
The Solution
Vox Media uses Lumos to encourage new and current employees to “shop” for corporate-approved SaaS apps through the Lumos AppStore. Employees can request access from within Slack or a Web App, approvals are directly routed to the right managers and provisioning is automated. With Lumos, the Vox Media team was able to automate the IT busy work, while giving employees a consumer-like experience.
“We were allowing individuals to select technology that fits best their workflow, but being able to identify and guide them towards securing them properly or monitoring them was huge. So once Lumos came into the picture, and we started seeing these, we're like, "Now we know where we need to put our efforts to consolidate all this."
Key Benefits
Productivity
With Lumos, Vox Media’s IT team was relieved from a lot of busy work. Up to 50% of all IT tickets are software access requests. Especially during an acquisition of a larger company, provisioning work was top-of-mind for IT. With their Company AppStore, Vox Media created a one-stop shop where people can request access, get the right approvals and automate provisioning. No work for IT.
Security + Compliance
Vox Media relies on the Lumos platform to enforce least privilege access to apps and also speed up compliance prep. Vox Media uses Lumos as a single source of truth for employee access. Now, they have a full audit log of evidence to prove to auditors privileged access requests. In total, Lumos saved Vox at least 20% during their audits.
OffBoarding Automation
Lumos helps Vox Media streamline employee offboarding by giving IT visibility into the Shadow IT apps that employees signed up for. When employees leave or when Lumos detects that they stopped using the app, the IT team can easily put in a request to deprovision the accounts and reclaim the license.