CA Technologies announced that SEC Servizi, a leading IT services provider to financial institutions, implemented access management solutions from CA Technologies to help protect banks and individual consumers from multiple security threats.
The solutions help SEC Servizi prevent unauthorised access to the more than 100 web applications that underpin its intranet, extranet and Internet banking platform.
"Driving security and 24/7 service availability without impacting costs has become a business imperative for our customers," said Fabio Fregi, Country Manager, CA Technologies Italy.
SEC Servizi's service portfolio includes application management, system hosting, and management of remote banking services and ATMs. It supports 35 Italian banks, financial services and industrial companies with 1,460 branch offices, 2,000 financial advisors and some four million end customers.
"Reliability is a key requirement for meeting demanding service level agreements (SLAs) specified in our customer contracts," explains Cesare Zuppa, IT Architecture Manager at SEC Servizi. "Since we guarantee 99.98 percent availability of our IT services, Web access security is mission-critical for us, and we must be able to depend on it around the clock. Even the shortest interruption would prevent our customers from accessing the services they need, potentially impacting our business financially."
CA SiteMinder Web Access Manager, CA SiteMinder Federation and CA SiteMinder Web Services Security provide SEC Servizi with single sign-on, identity federation and user authentication in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) across its Web-based environment.
"CA SiteMinder is a perfect fit for our needs," states Zuppa. "In addition to providing effective protection of Web applications with single sign-on, it is very reliable with low latency even during traffic peaks. It is also easy to manage and provides the scalability we need to support business growth."
"We have obtained excellent results," says Zuppa. "We have not noted any vulnerabilities related to our CA SiteMinder security system in seven years."
SEC Servizi has also been able to deliver near-continuous access to services, with its internet banking application achieving 99.45% availability.
These results have been achieved without straining resources. As Zuppa explains, "The CA Technologies solutions can be managed by our own IT personnel and without full-time resource commitments - even though the number of our web-based applications has grown tenfold. This allows us to focus on other business activities."