Chamu’s career started as a Backend Developer at Fujitsu in the Enterprise and Cybersecurity department. As Identity and Access Management is a specialized field, we asked her if she could share some of the key milestones and projects in her career that played a significant role in her expertise development. Chamu explains that in her role at Fujitsu, she got to work firsthand in building a whole Identity Management solution from scratch. This tool's first customers were all Schools and Universities from the City of Stockholm that catered to over 140.000 end users. The knowledge she gained from this practical experience is something she could have never gotten any other way.  

Following that, Chamu worked as a Developer and then an Architect at Nixu Coperations, with Saviynt as the chosen IGA tool. Saviynt was already a market leader by the time she started working with it. Although onboarding 140.000 on the Identity Management solution should have been the biggest highlight of her career, she considers following to be the test of her potential at the time. She worked on the Eaton-merger project for the Danish Manufacturing and Engineering Company, Danfoss. Over 10.000 Eaton users were onboarded on existing operational Identity Management system in production that already had all Danfoss users onboarded. It is important to mention that at the time, she was the only person working on the project since the implementation team were in a month-long holiday.

Danfoss implementation won the Identity Fabrics & Enterprise IAM Project of the Year award in KuppingerCole’s European Identity and Cloud Conference in 2021 🏆, the summer of the same year when she worked on Danfoss-Eaton merger project.

Implementing Saviynt for over 4 years including some experience as a Senior Technical Consultant in the Expert Services team within Saviynt as a firm itself, imbibed within her the technical expertise and architectural prowess required to implement IGA solution for a variety of customers with a small to large userbase in several sectors such as Banking, Insurance, Production, and Fashion Industry. She also worked as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the FMCG firm, Unilever. Chamu has handled clients from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Germany, The U.K and The Netherlands. She also worked as a pre-sales Solution Architect, and during this time they bagged Nixu's first-ever Benelux client. 

Having a background in developing a tool and getting hands-on within few years with the leading cloud IGA Solution, Saviynt, she got the best thrust to develop in the Identity sector. 

We asked Chamu what advice she would give to aspiring professionals looking to build a career in the Identity and Access Management field. She says, that as an IAM Consultant, the cornerstone of implementing a good solution is to understand what the customer's pain points are! It is simple to setup Integrations using APIs and creating complex code, but it is important to make a scalable solution that will not only fix the problems today but is also extendable to solve problems of tomorrow. Never hesitate to ask questions – be it your customer or the product consultants; if you have a question, ask away! There is no shame in it, and it is the only way to learn and grow.

Chamu describes that she has two people who have inspired her a bit extra throughout her career. Firstly, Timo Jokinen, IdM Product Architect at Fujitsu who has more than three decades of experience in IT. He helped her to understand the foundations of Identity Management. Also, Juha Räsänen, who taught her all about being an IGA Architect. Chamu still strives to be as good as him. Both are her heroes in her Identity journey 🦸

Finally, we asked Chamu about her career aspirations, and how she plan to continue making an impact in the IAM/IGA field. She answers that she has gained a lot of knowledge in the past years working as a consultant and she would like to focus on sharing that knowledge for new aspirants. Her aim has never been to get the next biggest position but have always been to focus on gaining more knowledge on new and emerging technologies. Identity field is ever evolving. Chamu is curious to see how AI is going to dip its toe in the sector. It is going to have a major impact and she is in for the ride! 

Way to go, Chamu! You inspire many with your impressive background and history, yet positive and can-do attitude towards everything – we are so proud to have you working here with us at Epical 🧡

Read part one of Chamu's career story article here.