Case Study: Village Roadshow boosts employee experience

Entertainment company, Village Roadshow needed an identity solution that could work across multiple use cases throughout its business. 

The group's chief information officer Arul Arogyanathan told Digital Nation, the likes of digital identity and verification play a key role in its cyber security posture when it comes to the employee and customer experience. 

Village Roadshow runs and operates theme parks, cinema exhibitions, film and DVD distribution and marketing solutions.

“If you look at today's digital era, identity is the first and most recurrent touch point. 

“It's kind of a gateway to experiences that any business offers and that's key to influencing the trust, loyalty, brand, brand, perception.

“On the other side, if you look at the 2022 cyber security report, 61 percent of the data breaches where the initial threat vector was the identity compromise.

"If you put that in the context, it is very important to provide a seamless but secure, personalised identity verification,” Arogyanathan said.  

He said the business has around 5500 employees, working casually or full-time, plus “a footprint of about 2. 8 million customer identities”.  

To build out a secure and “simple solution” Village Roadshow implemented cloud-based identity provider Okta.

“If you're onboarding a contingent or a casual workforce, you need to give them access to probably about eight to ten different applications.

“Those applications could have 10 to 15 different roles and now trying to put that in a context where you're hiring or your turnover is about 500 employees year on year, you can imagine the magnitude and the complexity of onboarding and offboarding those employees. 

“Similarly, from an audit and compliance perspective, this is a reporting nightmare and how do we track the compliance training and there are instances where there are shared workstations that are used,” he said. 

Arogyanathan said the business needed a solution that was “fit for purpose” and that was “scalable, secure and reliable.’

The company also has “needed to be able to use our existing skills and leverage this particular product on a day one.

“We wanted to make sure that there is an out-of-the-box integration available from this identity solution that we're looking for.

“We wanted to make sure that the identity solution that we choose provides the single sign-on capability out of the box. 

“In a nutshell, unlike other solutions that we evaluated in the market, which demand constant maintenance and specialised developer skills, we wanted to embrace the platform that pretty much operates on an autopilot offering out-of-the-box features that would translate into efficiency and productivity on a day one.”

Arogyanathan explained Village Roadshow started “one step at a time” with solution integration and the team continuing to evolve its systems. 

“We explored Okta in a customer identity space. That solution has been pretty much now live for close to one year and with the successful implementation and productivity and the business value that we could gain from that.

“We implemented the next stage, which was workforce identity management and we've been almost live on that particular solution for about eight months now.

"Workforce identity management took about eight weeks to onboard 10 different applications and almost 5500 employees.

He added the team “kept evolving with more and more features like adaptive MFA, geofencing and other new features rolling out on and trying to create that seamless experience for our customers."

The new digital identity platform has allowed Village Roadshow to close security gaps in its employee onboarding experience.

Arogyanathan said the company plans to push forward and continues to upgrade its systems including looking at additional features such as passkey or Okta Fastpass.