Canon Streamlines Access With Enterprise-wide Single Sign-on

The Objective

Headquartered in the UK, Canon Europe is a subsidiary of Canon Inc. of Japan, a leading innovator, and provider of imaging solutions that was founded in 1937. Canon Europe contributes around one-third of Canon’s global sales revenue and employs approximately 18,000 people across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Canon needed to provide their workforce users with secure and seamless access to roughly 15 line-of-business applications. Many of these disparate applications required discrete user access processes. Managing them was not only creating complexity for Canon’s IT team, but it was also increasing the potential for security weaknesses and productivity loss.

The Challenge

As part of their Unity project—a digital transformation initiative centered on establishing high-profile business processes supported by appropriate IT systems—Canon is building a hybrid architecture of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications. They needed a federated approach to identity and access management (IAM) to provide flexibility, security, and simplified management.

They also wanted to implement enterprise-wide single-sign-on (SSO). But they needed a solution that could integrate seamlessly with Oracle E-Business Suite, which is being used for procurement, manufacturing, and logistics, as well as comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) requirements, including policy enforcement, risk assessment, and compliance auditing.

The Solution

Canon Europe evaluated several single sign-on solutions, ultimately selecting PingFederate because of its powerful feature set, support for diverse access requirements, and seamless integration across Canon’s broad application set. PingFed’s ability to extend SSO capabilities to Oracle EBS through simple adapters and agents allows for a modular approach to identity federation and streamlines integration with other Canon systems and SaaS applications.

Canon’s employees and partners now have secure access to portals, SaaS applications, and third-party systems from any device using a single set of login credentials. Using PingFed’s policy-driven adaptive authentication, Canon is aggregating user and device context data to centralize control over authentication and SSO. They’re also able to leverage third-party authentication sources and multiple authentication options—depending on user and device context—to dynamically discover a user’s identity provider. By building granular rules for user authentication and access, Canon is able to meet the security, governance, and compliance requirements of a multinational corporation.