The Swiss companies Bâloise Insurance and Bâloise Bank SoBa operate jointly as a focused financial services provider, a combination of insurer and bank. Both entities are known for their integrated solutions in the areas of insurance, pension provision and asset formation for private clients and small and medium-sized businesses. The companies found an improved identity management solution from Sun.

Faced with the need to replace the legacy identity management solution, which was time consuming and costly to operate without delivering a robust process for managing identities and user permissions, Bâloise Insurance saw an opportunity to completely overhaul its existing systems. The current identity management platform consisted of IBM's Lotus Notes database, which stored information on the company’s 2,900 business roles, and ASG's Identity Manager solution, which held information on the business’s 8,000 IT roles.

Because these solutions were not connected, administrators had to manually reconcile data between the two. As a result, the current system's data didn't align, causing a lack of transparency and errors. In addition, when a new employee needed access to the network, or someone changed business roles and needed to log in to new applications, the process for updating the systems, gaining approval from managers, and provisioning access was time consuming.

Ghislaine Ackermann Pfluger, lead of Bâloise’s user management team, says, “The identity management solution was not sustainable, so when the technology went end-of-life, we looked to create a completely integrated solution that increased efficiencies.”

With the assistance of Sun Professional Services, Bâloise Insurance deployed Sun Identity Manager on Sun Fire V440 servers running Solaris 10. As a result, the company created an integrated platform for assigning and approving access based on employee business roles.

Implementing this system resulted in the deployment of an integrated platform for managing identities with improved transparency on business and IT roles that aligned data on roles and access rights and reduced provisioning time by approximately eight hours a month. This flexible solution also promises to meet the demands of future growth.

In the course of its search for a new solution, Bâloise sent out a request for proposal to multiple IT solution providers, including Sun, Novell, and IBM. After assessing each solution, the company chose Sun Identity Manager, which delivered an integrated platform with a low TCO for assigning and approving access based on business roles. “Compared with other solutions, the Sun technology offered a more flexible platform for provisioning identities, which we could scale easily in the future,” says Ackermann Pfluger.

The new management platform is based on a three-tier architecture featuring test, integration, and production environments. Each environment has two WebLogic JEE application servers and Sun Identity Manager running on Sun Fire V440 server hardware and Solaris 10. Out-of-the-box adapters connect the platform to external systems that contain identity attributes. These systems include an DB2 database , an IBM Mainframe resource access control facility (RACF), a Human Resources file feed, Microsoft’s Active Directory and the main banking system, Avaloq.

As implemented at Bâloise, Sun Identity Manager manages approximately 6,500 users and several thousand business and IT roles. And because the solution has integrated the process for administering business and IT roles, the data are fully aligned, eliminating the risk of errors. Says Ackermann Pfluger, “Administrators have complete transparency regarding business roles and access rights.” This enables the identity auditing process at Bâloise Insurance and Baloise Bank SoBa to be fully automated, in line with tougher compliance guidelines worldwide.

In addition to delivering increased security, the company has also lowered overhead costs for managing identities. Comments Ackermann Pfluger, “The Sun Identity Manager solution saves us up to eight hours a month in provisioning and approving roles. The support from Sun Professional Services was excellent during the whole project.”

Managers can now access the system directly and update users' status and business roles themselves. As a result, the user management team can allocate access rights to IT applications much quicker, enabling the company to launch new projects faster and increase business agility. Ackermann Pfluger says, “Sun Identity Manager is helping improve performance across the business.” The company now plans to extend the solution to include additional target applications and user groups.

More Information

Sun Identity Manager

Sun Fire V440 Server

How Sun Approaches Identity Management

Sun Identity Manager 8.1 Newest Features [...read more...]

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