Georgia city standardizes IT account management system

Marietta, Ga. is a thriving municipality located in central Cobb County, Georgia, and is one of the largest suburbs in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The city has more than 1,000 employees on its payroll, excluding the school system.

Each of Marietta’s employees needs access to the municipal IT network and a personal account created when they begin employment for the city. All employees, when hired, need the same basic network access. Over time, employees may require access to different systems and applications if they transfer to a different department or experience other work changes. Marietta had been handling account management and provisioning accounts manually, which was time consuming and subject to potential errors.

In addition, only one employee was able to handle account provisioning, which led to a major bottleneck when several newly hired employees needed to be provisioned. “With everything that was involved it would take up to 40 minutes to create a single account. It would sometimes take me an entire morning to provision accounts that were needed,” says James Baker, network administrator for Marietta.

Marietta IT leaders looked for solutions to solve the city’s account management issues. They chose a user management resource administrator (UMRA) product because of its ability to integrate with current systems in place. Tools4ever is the provider of UMRA. The system, which was installed in 2009, also performed exactly as needed in the current environment.

The software allows a manager to enter each employee’s data one time and have accounts automatically provisioned. UMRA automatically provisions a user account in Active Directory, creates the appropriate folders for them and creates accounts in any connected applications. This also allows all employee user accounts to be set up in a standardized manner.

City IT officials then needed to ensure that when an employee was no longer employed by the city, the employee was removed from the domain. Otherwise, an ex-employee could become a security risk if they were accidentally left active on the city’s network. UMRA allows them to easily check a box in the user’s profile and automatically remove all of their folders and accounts. This ensures that a user is easily removed with one click rather than manually having to remove them from each system or application. Most importantly, this ensures that the city’s network remains secure.

With UMRA software in place, the city can now focus on other more important projects other than account management.

“There has been a major reduction in time (spent on these services). I can sit down to create user accounts and be done in just a few minutes, whereas before I would have to spend my entire morning creating accounts if there were multiple new users,” Baker says.

Tools4ever: www.tools4ever.com

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