Northcell consolidated 11 acquisitions into one identity fabric
Europe's fastest-growing telecom rolled 11 acquired companies — 112,000 users across nine directories — into a single Authr-governed identity plane in one fiscal year.
Growth by acquisition, chaos by default
Eleven acquisitions in five years had left Northcell with nine directories, four identity vendors, and an onboarding process that involved — in one subsidiary — a shared spreadsheet named FINAL_access_v7. Security reviews before each new deal kept finding the same thing: nobody could say, definitively, who had access to what.
The trigger was regulatory: a national telecom authority audit gave Northcell 18 months to demonstrate unified access governance across all subsidiaries.
A playbook instead of a project
Rather than a big-bang consolidation, Northcell and Authr built an acquisition playbook: connect the acquired company's existing directory through Directory Sync on day one, mirror its groups into Authr's policy plane, then progressively retire the legacy directory once every downstream app is federated.
The first integration took 96 days. The eleventh took 31. The playbook is now part of Northcell's M&A diligence package — the identity integration plan ships with the term sheet.
Governance as a live property
The regulator's question — who has access to what — now has a real-time answer. Session Intelligence gives Northcell's SOC a single view of every session across every subsidiary, and offboarding propagates in under a minute, verified by Audit Fabric evidence the auditors accept directly.
Northcell passed its access-governance audit eight months early. The identity team's next project is extending the same fabric to the operational technology side of the network — with the same playbook.
“M&A used to mean fourteen months of identity archaeology per deal. With Authr, integration is a repeatable playbook we run in five to six weeks. Our board now treats it as a diligence asset.”
HJHenrik JohanssonGroup Chief Information Officer, Northcell
