Beach Energy is a long time Identifly customer and an ASX listed oil, gas exploration and production company, with operations spanning Australia and New Zealand.

In 2020, Identifly commenced work with Beach Energy to modernise their IAM technology and processes by securing users and applications using Okta, with a focus on enhancing the end-user experience.

Our work with Beach has included the rollout of a centralised cloud Identity Provider including strong authentication and access policies, HR-driven provisioning, roles-based access, automated application provisioning, governance with SailPoint, and most recently privileged access management (PAM) with CyberArk.

As we know, passwords are the weakest link in the user perimeter, so it was essential for Beach to adopt the principles of Zero Trust. This included designing policies and integrations that reflected an ‘assume breach’ mindset, minimising access rights and applying strong authentication for access to sensitive applications and services.

Implementing more granular access controls allowed the team to enforce the principle of least privilege, giving access to users as needed for their role. The concept of zero-standing privileges was further rolled out to privileged users, where access is assigned based on request, only for the time required.

The Beach team continue to work towards this Zero Trust goal, with each change and enhancement strengthening existing investments.

The initial success of Beach’s program was published in IT News, and the initial identity project was also a finalist in the 2021 iTnews Benchmark Awards.