If you are managing an Azure AD, you should use Bsure. There is really no need to hesitate, says Tommy Sollyst, IT manager at the Blue Cross Norway. 

• The tool provides very good insights into your own data and makes you safer. It costs little, and if you use the solution to clean up, you will save more than it costs. 

Blue Cross Norway operates a variety of different services and units. 

• We have everything from a small office in Horten that serves food, to 5 high schools, to treatment facilities with over 200 employees, to a store that sells firewood, to job-oriented courses. 

Tommy explains to show the width among the 52 different businesses and 1,700 IT users who are in Blue Cross Norway, which are spread across the country. 

In 2015, many of these units went from having responsibility for their own IT, to the IT department becoming centralized. 

• When I started in 2020, there were two of us working with IT centrally at Blue Cross Norway, and we coordinated with IT managers in the units. Now we are 13 in the department at Blue Cross Norway that provides services across the businesses. IT services are organized centrally, but are still represented locally in several places. 

Cut Costs 

The fact that they have centralized IT departments also means they have centralized IT systems. All units were moved into the OnPrem data center in 2015 and are now moving to the cloud and the same Microsoft ecosystem. 

• That means we took over many different user databases (AD), with users, permissions, and access, explains Tommy. 

It also meant a great need for overview, as well as cleaning up AD, users, and permissions. 

With Bsure, Tommy got an overview of users. One of the benefits of this is that he could cut costs. 

• For example, I can search for users who have not been active in the past three months, and then find out why. It happens that users are created for people who were supposed to start, but never did. And it’s often that people quit, without IT being informed, so the user is not deleted. “With so many different businesses, it’s not always that the routine works,” says Tommy. 

He has also seen many cases of overlapping licenses. 

• Microsoft is good at bundling different software together. So, we could cut a lot of costs just by looking at areas where we had duplicate licenses, says Tommy. 

User control is important for IT security 

It’s not just cost savings that make Tommy recommend Bsure. 

• “There is also a security perspective. At Blå Kors, we work with vulnerable people, and we store sensitive data. So, it is especially important that we have control over who has access to this data and what rights they have,” Tommy says. 

If a user has more rights than they should have, they can do: 

• Gain access to data that the person should not have access to. 
• Do great damage if the person does something wrong. 
• If the user is compromised/hacked, the hacker will then have many permissions into the system. 

With Bsure, Tommy can get the overview he needs to ensure that there are no users with rights they should not have. 

• “For example, an external consultant may come in and be granted administrator privileges for a period of time. If you forget to remove these, it is unfortunate. Then we may have an inactive user with administrator privileges,” says Tommy. 

And inactive users are more vulnerable to compromise. So deleting users you don’t need, means both cost savings and increased security. 

It is a policy at Blue Cross Norway that everyone should have multi-factor authentication. However, it happens that some people do not. 

• “To be able to set it up, you need a mobile number. And then there are some people who, for some reason, don’t have one when they set it up, and then they don’t set up multi-factor authentication,” Tommy explains. 

In Bsure, Tommy can extract lists of users who have not installed Multi-factor, so that these can be followed up. In this way, he ensures that the policy around Multi-factor is actually being complied with. 

There is no doubt 

In Bsure, Tommy and the rest of the IT department can have control over users, costs, several aspects of IT security, and an overview of the information registered in Azure AD. 

He has no doubts about whether he recommends Bsure. 

• “Everyone who administers an Azure AD should have Bsure. There is no doubt about it. The tool provides very good insights into your own data and makes you “safer”. It is inexpensive, and if you actively clean up, you save more than it costs,” says Tommy.