| Identity Management and Global Trust |
| Helping a Fortune 500 financial services firm maintain global trust within a decentralized environment. |
| Business Issue |
| This company's primary asset was its globally-recognized brand as a trusted and reliable financial services company. This trust was based on the ability to deliver its services quickly, securely and consistently through its centrally-controlled, private and proprietary systems network. |
| Over a 5 year span the organization had regionalized its business and operations. At the same time it moved to more open standards-based networks to become more connected to its business partners and customers. The flexibility the company has gained has come at a cost. The traditional trust environment created by centrally controlled, private and proprietary systems and networks was no longer in place and new controls and approaches were needed to continue to guarantee the trust in its brand. |
| Edgile’s Solution |
| Edgile began by working with the organization to help them fully understand and clearly define the business problem. The problem definition was communicated to the highest levels of the organization to drive consensus and garner support. Edgile also worked within the existing governance model of the organization to gain regional consensus and support. |
| A number of issues needed to be addressed within the global organization. Each region was operating from a different set of policies leading to inconsistent levels of trust and security across the regions. These policies were defined at such a high level that additional requirements were needed to create a clear and solid baseline for each regional organization. Edgile helped the client draft a set of policies and supporting standards for the global firm and its regional organizations. |
| The assurance of safe, secure, and consistently delivered services resulting from the closed proprietary network was no longer available with the move to open, standards-based networks. As user management was regionalized, user access to required information within the global enterprise was disrupted. Additional levels of security and trust needed to be put into the application layer and around data and documents in order to operate over the federated, regional environment. Edgile worked with the client to establish a federated trust environment based on open standards and public key technology. A new security strategy and architecture was established using a pre-existing global root certification authority to support regional subordinate certification authorities. Policies and standards were established to support interoperability and consistent security. |
| Edgile is currently helping the company establish the new trust environment by working with regional entities to design and deploy subordinate regional certificate authorities to support the federated identity management model defined by the global strategy. Edgile designed and implemented Certificate Authority (CA) and smart card management system that tied in closely to the company’s current Microsoft Active Directory (AD). The design took into consideration a number of business use of certificates, including file encryption, email encryption, non-repudiation, key-recovery, and federated identity management and reduced sign-on. |
| Business Value |
| Today, the organization has a clear strategy and direction for maintaining a globally trusted environment while supporting its business goal of decentralizing operations for increased regional flexibility. The global organization is strongly supporting and moving towards the creation of a more consistent level of security across the enterprise and the development of a federated trust environment based on a global certificate authority and consistent standards. |
