Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

IBM
Armonk, NY

Tivoli Policy Director from IBM
> Information Access Management

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

Companies have traditionally had to manage people’s identities and access rights individually across each heterogeneous operating system and application. This creates cost issues as these companies move more of their business interactions to the Internet, Today, that complexity has become unacceptable with the business imperative to provide personalized services to users. A financial services, petrochemical and telecommunications firms were among IBM’s reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Driving higher value customer interactions

§ Establishing a single sign-on infrastructure

§ Lowering the cost of administrative and help desk support

WHY TIVOLI?

IBM provides an infrastructure for managing access to e-business and legacy applications on a large scale. Tivoli Policy Director from IBM supports access to applications from traditional, Web, and wireless clients via many authentication modes. Companies can configure the appropriate levels of security according to policy, define roles, and automate the provisioning of users’ resources through an advanced workflow capability.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Migration to a single sign-on approach under Tivoli generates almost immediate help desk–related savings. All of Tivoli’s reference customers reported substantial reductions in lost/forgotten password support calls. In a number of cases, companies were reducing the number of logons a user had to manage from dozens to one.

Enterprise innovation: e-business can create new opportunities and efficiencies. Organizations want an infrastructure that will allow them to extend the convenient single sign-on to external customers and partners. One reference customer used Tivoli to support a wireless transaction service for business customers. A financial institution has rolled out a new service to its high-end clients. Both implementations combined a range of separate Web applications and sites with existing legacy systems.

Technology gains: By driving traffic through the Tivoli infrastructure, companies reduce the complexity of developing for the Web. It goes beyond the elimination of application-by-application logon support. A number of Tivoli’s customers are leveraging IBM’s LDAP schema to populate disparate Web applications with user profile information, streamlining the development process and the end-user’s application experience.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: All of Tivoli’s customers valued the role that IBM can play as a full-service provider. System architects advise prospective customers to walk carefully through the initial design process. In particular, they encourage companies to architect with ongoing changes in mind. In a number of instances, eventual expansion forced IT teams to reset and restructure their LDAP schema as they ported Tivoli Policy Director to more applications.

Learning: Education is the key to success with internal users and external customers. People need notice well in advance if their passwords and procedures are going to change.

Resources: A number of customers created a centralized organization for managing the rules for provisions and changes to access policies in conjunction with their Tivoli implementation.

Fit: Companies aggressively embracing a holistic e-business strategy should consider Tivoli as a key component of their security infrastructures.

COMPANY INFO

IBM Corporation is a publicly traded company (NYSE:IBM) with 316,000 employees worldwide.

512.436.8000
www.tivoli.com/security
Published: January 2002