Background & Challenge

Founded in 1966, China Auto Corp—the biggest China Automobile corp—is a manufacturer in the automobile industry. Supplying original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with automotive components, they leverage their supply chain expertise to keep customers one step ahead. RankEZ is a leading provider of Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions for the modern enterprise, helping reduce risk, ensure compliance, and simplify security for thousands of customers worldwide

The management of privileged accounts and password storage was a major area of contention. "When I arrived, privileged account credentials were stored in an unsecured manner and were scattered through multiple repositories (Excel, Word, and Teams)," he recalled. This lack of proper password management meant the team spent more time investigating access issues than resolving critical recovery activities.

Mr Chen was particularly concerned about employee turnover, fearing the team wouldn't be able to rotate passwords confidently or even access critical systems if an employee left the company. With numerous third-party vendors rolling in and out to support their automotive manufacturing operations, securing remote access was also a top priority.

Furthermore, the company's previous vault solution lacked Microsoft® Active Directory-based authentication for their Linux systems. This meant a massive number of servers and thousands of local accounts required costly and time-consuming hands-on management, putting immense pressure on the IT department. Because of this complexity, the company decided to implement a comprehensive PAM solution across its infrastructure.

Solution

Mr Wang was already familiar with the ease of use and capabilities of RankEZ PAM from a previous role, which immediately brought it to the top of their evaluation list. The customer benchmarked RankEZ PAM against their incumbent provider and found the RankEZ team possessed the exact characteristics they were looking for in a long-term relationship. Mr Zheng, the Cybersecurity Analyst who spearheaded the implementation, noted that the team was highly responsive and communicative. He was able to speak directly with engineers, thoroughly evaluate the product, and ultimately found it offered an "extremely competitive cost-to-value ratio".

Benefit

Today, the customer relies on RankEZ PAM to securely manage credentials for nearly 200 systems, including critical network switches, dozens of web portals, and local administrative accounts for over 100 workstations. RankEZ PAM has successfully become their central repository, protecting accounts through layered verification, while features like "heartbeat" greatly increase confidence in credential validity.

In just the first six months after implementation, the team slashed the time and effort spent hunting for the right credentials down to just 10% of what they expended previously.

For their next phase, the automotive manufacturer plans to onboard managed service and network service providers, allocating them RankEZ PAM accounts to handle check-in, check-out, and rotation for third parties. "Their passwords will sync and it will mitigate our exposure to risk," noted Mr Zhang.

Quote

RankEZ PAM has allowed us to expand our capabilities to make passwords more secure and give us a lot more confidence in those passwords. Now, if I need to get into our firewall router or our server accounts, it's a lot easier to just go into RankEZ PAM. It fits into our layered security approach and ensures process control. It brings great value in protecting the organization’s assets"