Evolving identity and access management for the cloud
Security, performance, and reliability are the guiding principles behind Microsoft's identity and access management solutions. These solutions empower organizations to maintain their competitive edge by leveraging technology effectively. With Microsoft's robust cloud infrastructure, customer business teams, plant workers, and external vendors can manage huge workloads independently and around the clock. Collaborative success is facilitated, ensuring timely results and efficient release cycles, helping businesses like the BMW Group stay at the forefront of their markets.
Before it can achieve results or make a measurable impact, the BMW Group must give every employee, including independent workers, highly safe and secure access to company systems and devices. It’s for that reason the whole company couldn’t function without identity management authentication. If employees can’t securely sign in to their systems and workstations, all work comes to a halt.
Microsoft's identity and access management solutions play a crucial role in enhancing security, efficiency, and user experience across various industries. For the BMW Group specifically, conversations about identity systems are occurring against a backdrop of organization-wide modernization. The company chose to move to the cloud early on so it could unlock more opportunities for on-demand flexibility, scalability, and fast access to technological innovations, especially new and advanced security features.
As the BMW Group started to migrate its IT estate to Microsoft Azure, it also wanted a more secure platform for its on-premises Microsoft Active Directory environment and domain controllers. The group has some older applications that require Active Directory identification and access services but aren’t yet compatible with next-generation, cloud-native Microsoft Entra ID protection. Some of these IT systems, servers, and applications are also old, difficult, and expensive to replace but essential to support onsite business or are standard in the automotive industry, such as the hardware and software components built into plant machinery used for car production. Use of this machinery can extend beyond 30 years. Given the dependencies, the BMW Group focuses more on building a foundation to boost reliability and stability for its production processes than integrating them with a modern authentication system.
In response, the BMW Group wanted to use its on-premises Active Directory licenses to migrate existing Active Directory servers and domain controllers to Azure while actively protecting data and storage resources, the privacy of data in server memory, and its overall operations.
Maintaining critical infrastructure with confidential virtual machines on Azure
Considering the criticality and sensitivity of its services, the BMW Group was interested in evaluating confidential computing, a technology that helps protect highly sensitive data that is in use in server memory. When the BMW Group started to look at confidential computing, Microsoft was the only vendor offering a generally available confidential computing platform for the BMW Group to bring their Active Directory domain controllers to the cloud: the Azure DCasv5 confidential virtual machines (VMs) using 3rd generation AMD EPYC™ processors. This technology allowed them to do the migration without changing any code.
BMW Group IT specialists decided to start with confidential VMs running Active Directory services as a tier 0 workload in Azure to tighten security and put those servers on a future-proven track for how to continue operating Active Directory for the next 5–10 years. As it started using confidential VMs, the BMW Group appreciated being able to eliminate several potential attack paths as it used domain controllers in a public cloud environment for the first time. Without confidential computing, the datacenter operator, host operator, and VM host operator could have been able to access company systems and the Active Directory database. On top of the added security benefits moving forward, the BMW Group IT specialists also remarked that performance for workloads and applications didn’t suffer running on the AMD based confidential VMs, which greatly reduced worries about potential lapses in availability while making the switch.
The group’s Azure DCasv5 confidential VMs using 3rd generation AMD EPYC™ processors have quickly become the center of its architecture and the main component for its domain controllers. Staying within the Microsoft ecosystem for daily identity administration, its privileged access workstation relies on Intune, Azure Bastion, Azure Key Vault, Azure Key Vault Managed HSM, and other Microsoft Security services. Additionally, many of its modern applications that don’t require earlier Active Directory support are onboarded directly to Entra ID.
Changing attitudes, adopting a Zero Trust security model, and measuring success
Many organizations recognize that security and identity and access management are two pieces of the same puzzle, each with an essential role in their organization’s operations. The BMW Group’s staff have helped build a castle, strengthening security from the outside in, and any activity within the network is on the secure side. Now, they are moving to a Zero Trust framework, which removes any implicit trust and requires each component, supplier, and authentication process to be thoroughly assessed and validated before being granted access. From this internal perspective, the main challenge is to upskill everybody in their team. It’s a completely different way to deploy infrastructure, which is now mainly done by code instead of requesting and installing a physical server.
But the result for BMW Group customers is an almost invisible benefit that’s extremely meaningful. It was key not to have any downtime or business impacts, and company staff successfully and seamlessly deployed services for customers with the first bunch of domain controllers running on Azure, without those customers noticing or having to worry about where services were coming from. The group’s main measure of success is getting rid of all its on-premises components, including all on-premises servers and many supporting systems previously needed to offer and support BMW Group services. In doing so, the BMW Group will have all of its systems needed for Active Directory operation hosted on Azure.
Achieving security goals and sharing cloud experiences across the business
The BMW Group’s new highly secure architecture and DCasv5 confidential VMs touch every part of the business across the full life cycle of identities and are used by internal and external employees, large and strategic partners, and joint venture partners. Boosting security and safeguarding its platform were the company’s main goals and are now its main benefits. The BMW Group is heavily reducing its risk, with the main goal of making it very difficult for an attacker to get into its systems. Microsoft's geographically widespread Azure datacenters enhance businesses' ability to support local branches and plants, increasing service availability and distribution around the globe.
Planned IT projects at the BMW Group include transitioning to DCasv6 VMs, the newest confidential VMs on Azure using 4th generation AMD EPYC processors, which will bring with them a 30% performance increase over what the company has already gained. IT specialists are also installing Windows Hello for Business on all client devices within the group, letting employees sign in and authenticate themselves using biometrics.
With continued success moving its sensitive workloads to Azure, the BMW Group plans to share its experiences with other teams across the organization. It also wants to bring the benefits of its architecture to other core systems that have high demand for identity and access protection, with everything it’s done so far showing what’s possible for the future.
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