Bâloise Insurance

Story Details

When its identity management solution needed replacing, Bâloise Insurance saw an opportunity to completely overhaul its existing systems. The organization, which is part of the Bâloise Group based in Switzerland, focused on compliance and the efficiency of automating user provisioning of all employees and partners where the Federal Accounting and Auditing Act (RRG) legislation requires role management and access to be tightly audited. However, the current solution was time consuming and costly to operate without delivering a robust process for managing identities and user permissions.

Its 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 the 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.”

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.

Following a proof-of-concept phase, Bâloise Insurance rolled out Sun Identity Manager across the business, including Baloise Bank SoBa, with the support of Sun Professional Services. Because the customer had to resolve discrepancies in the existing data, the project timeline was extended by three months. However, Professional Services helped the customer overcome these challenges and deliver a robust identity management platform that speeded up the whole provisioning process.

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 the Solaris 10 Operating System. 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.

Today, 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.

Apart from the 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 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.