The Rimac Group leverages Syskit Point to avoid security issues in their M365 environment
Customer
The Rimac Group, led by CEO Mate Rimac, is a majority shareholder of Bugatti Rimac and the sole stakeholder of Rimac Technology.
The Group brings together the most advanced hypercars in the world with a globally renowned team developing high-performance electrification, autonomous, and software solutions for the world’s largest OEMs.
Rimac is based on the outskirts of Zagreb, Croatia, with locations around Europe, and currently employs over 1,300 people.
From 2023, the Rimac Group will be headquartered at a new state-of-the-art 200,000 m2 Rimac Campus, large enough to accommodate over 2,500 people.
Their Nevera, a hypercar capable of exceptional speeds, swift and powerful beyond comprehension, holds a world record in performance. With 1914 HP, it accelerates from 0-100 KM/H in 1.97 seconds!
Like the mighty storm system from which it takes its name, Nevera is a force like no other.
We wanted to set up triggers for alerts if some inappropriate or unregulated sharing of resources happens. We needed to know when it happens and get notified about it.
Robert Preskar, Head of IT projects, ERP, and digitalizationChallenge
The Rimac Group is on a mission to grow beyond what we believe is possible with EV and build the most advanced hypercars in the world.
With a bold mission like that, it’s undeniable that they will face obstacles and challenges along the way. That includes their Microsoft 365 environment.
Creating new governance policies and custom provisioning templates
The fusion of the automotive companies in The Rimac Group brought a substantial growth of employees and a need to have an information barrier between the companies coexisting in the same tenant – Bugatti Rimac and Rimac Technology. Although they are partners, some data sharing could lead to a conflict of interest.
The increase in the number of employees at The Rimac Group sparked the need to implement new governance policies. They needed to introduce new provisioning workflows for creating groups and teams because all new workspace creations needed to be approved by the manager of an IT department to maintain control of the tenant.
Since different companies inside the tenant of The Rimac Group have different requirements for creating and approving new teams, custom provisioning templates needed to be available.
Automating security alerts
The Rimac Group needed to be proactive about security and set up customized alerts to trigger when:
- sharing actions were taken with sensitive files and folders to have control over who has access to sensitive files,
- a private team became public, and they would need to take immediate action to keep the visibility of teams under control,
- there’s an attempt to delete a whole channel, regardless if it was an accident or on purpose,
- changes were made to Teams and Groups memberships, as when someone added or removed a member.
Solution
Robert and the team concluded that they needed a tool to serve as a central point for Teams and SharePoint governance and security.
They chose Syskit Point as it checked all the boxes to resolve their business needs and challenges.
“With this size of the team, and future expansion that we’re planning, it’s not going to be doable to maintain everything without the proper help of a tool.”
New provisioning policies and templates
New provisioning policies needed to be introduced because of potential conflicts of interest between the newly formed companies inside The Rimac Group.
“We needed to disable the basic functionality of creating a new team in Teams and implement a new request and approval process for opening a new team.”
This approval process merged in with their creation policies and Syskit Point’s functionalities for a new team. Admins can customize provisioning templates to fit the needs of every organization under the tenant. Then, users can:
- request a new Teams workspace,
- choose a template that is only visible to a company and department to which the end user belongs,
- automatically apply naming conventions and rules for that department and the company,
- select the members and owners of the new team,
- fill out the Terms and conditions fields so the company can confirm that the end user agrees to their internal security policy for Teams usage,
- send a Teams request with an option to add a note to the approval of the request.
The IT manager receives a notification inside the Teams app with details of the request and a note from the requester to be approved.
Automated custom security alerts and access management
Setting up custom alerts to avoid security problems is one of the most beneficial use cases of Syskit Point for The Rimac Group.
Alerts were triggered and sent as an email when there was:
- sharing of a document with users from The Group’s different organizations that are in a potential conflict of interest and don’t need to have access to a document,
- sharing a document with external users that could result in the leakage of important documents outside of the company,
- an attempt to delete a whole channel, regardless if it was an accident or on purpose.
“Setting up triggers and alerts if the user wants to share some especially sensitive folders and sites is extremely useful in preventing security breaches of data. This handles one of our most important business cases of why we needed the tool.”
Keeping control over file management and access, in general, was one of the most important challenges they needed to tackle. Checking who has access to information, especially sensitive ones such as confidential internal documents with sensitive automobile blueprints, is managed through the Syskit Point Access Management feature.
Through it, they can:
- control internal and external access to ensure their sensitive information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands,
- explore and manage permissions – grant, remove, copy, transfer, or edit user access,
- detect and manage content with unique permissions,
- identify and clean up permissions and memberships after a user leaves the company,
- add users to multiple groups and teams when new employees join the organization.
Adoption of Teams and user activity logs as an addition to primary uses of the tool
Rimac Technology, one of The Group members, has been using Teams as a collaboration tool from the company’s early days.
“We are Teams addicts at Rimac. It’s our primary collaboration tool, and we do everything inside it! The company’s policy is that communication over Teams has an advantage over email. That’s how valuable it is to us. The joint venture with Bugatti brought new challenges to us, and we had to onboard everyone on using Teams since they haven’t used it before.”
With Syskit Point’s Analytics and Adoption solution, they could now compare adoption between departments, detect trends in usage, see where they need to step in, and educate users to adapt to Teams’ possibilities. With internal training and live events, employees could get answers to all their questions about Teams.
Admins are pleased because they now target a more narrowed group of users to follow and understand their Teams usage. They can see how the overall adoption is flowing, especially in the Bugatti Rimac company, where they need to invest more into the adoption of Teams.
“Other use cases appeared. One which seemed trivial is getting to see the user activity logs in a more user-friendly way."
Through Audit Logs, they can now find out what the users and admins of both organizations have been doing.
Syskit Point collects the most important M365 audit logs and displays every permission, content, or configuration change in a simple and manageable way. They can find activities related to groups, documents, permissions, directory services, external sharing, privacy changes, or sensitivity label changes.
Results
The Rimac Group has great potential to manufacture and grow beyond what we believe is possible with hypercars and automotive technology. Syskit Point is one link in the chain in their mission to design, engineer, and build the most advanced automotive technology there is.
Resulting in:
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1.Teams provisioning templates and workflows for new teams and group creation
“It works flawlessly. We didn't have a single ticket on how to create a team in the new setup.”
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2.Automation of custom security alerts and access management
“It helps us proactively avoid severe security problems.”
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3.Effortless tracking of Teams and SharePoint adoption
“We can now compare and measure adoption between departments to see where we need to step in and educate users to adapt to Teams' possibilities.”
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4.Auditing admin and user actions
“Tracking user and admin actions helped us have control over suspicious activities.”
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5.Fast adoption of the tool
“It took us 5 days from the presentation of Syskit Point to being fully operational in production.”
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6.Seeing the benefits impacting workflows and ROI
“We're Teams addicts, and the Syskit Point Teams application feels native to us. It provided a familiar interface for our end-users to request new workspaces without leaving MS Teams.”
Fast, responsive, helpful, friendly, and open for suggestions – that’s how I would describe the Syskit team. And the tool – works flawlessly from day one, giving us great governance and security benefits for our Teams!
Robert Preskar, Head of IT projects, ERP, and digitalization