Financial Services Firm Creates Secure Portal with NetIQ and Wipro

The U.K. government enacted major changes in U.K. pension law in 2008 to ensure that all employees are automatically enrolled in workplace pensions provided by their employers. The government staggered the implementation of the law to give smaller companies more time to comply.

This U.K. insurance company faced a tight deadline for helping its large clients achieve compliance with automatic enrollment. To achieve compliance in an efficient manner, the company needed a solution to provide financial information and analytical tools to the administrators of company pension schemes and to financial advisors. Security was a critical concern: personal pension information is highly sensitive and is subject to strict U.K. and European Union (EU) legislation on data protection.

Given the limited time available and its desire to avoid capital investment, the U.K. insurer engaged Wipro, a leading global consultancy and systems integrator, to build the solution and deliver it as a service.

The NetIQ Solution
Based on its client's requirements for the solution-including rapid deployment, high security, easy auditability, and high scalability and performance-Wipro chose NetIQ Access Manager as the enabling technology for secure access.
"Our client needed to achieve very rapid time-to-market, so it was important to select technology offering comprehensive out-of-the-box functionality," said Shivaprakash Abburu, Head of Global Alliances and Marketing for Enterprise Security Solutions at Wipro. "Equally, we knew that the business requirements would continue to grow, so flexibility and scalability were vital criteria. NetIQ Access Manager was one of the products we considered at the start of the design phase, and the further we got, the more we knew it was the right solution."

Drawing on its technical skills and insurance-industry experience, Wipro deployed NetIQ Access Manager to provide secure, granular access to a web portal for pension scheme administrators and financial advisors. The solution integrates with multiple pension providers' schemes and employers' payroll systems to help employers manage their responsibilities across new and existing systems. It also provides financial modelling tools-giving detailed, employee-level views of the best-cost options for each business to achieve certification. The hub-and-spoke design of the solution ensures that employers retain control of employee payroll data.

NetIQ Access Manager provides single sign-on capabilities for the web portal, and gives the U.K. insurer the ability to control access rights to different types and levels of information. Essentially, the solution extends identity management across the customers of the U.K. insurer's customers. The NetIQ solution also provides an audit trail for all access activities, helping to demonstrate compliance with U.K. and EU data protection legislation.

"The portal currently handles around 5,000 users, and is expected to grow to 50,000 named users and 8,000 concurrent users within five years," said Abburu. "We are fully confident that NetIQ Access Manager will scale to handle these increased demands efficiently and without loss of performance."

Results:
Rapid Deployment
Using NetIQ Access Manager helped Wipro deliver the solution rapidly, meeting its client's tight deadline for complying with revised U.K. pension law. "The built-in capabilities of NetIQ Access Manager are very comprehensive, giving us most of the functionality we needed out of the box," said Abburu. "We estimate that the NetIQ technology enabled us to cut the deployment time by 40 percent."

The portal provides a completely new business capability to the U.K. insurer, bringing together information from multiple sources in a highly secure environment. The single sign-on capabilities make it fast and easy for users to access the information they need, and the audit capabilities simplify and accelerate compliance. The project was granted an "e-Excellence Award" by the U.K. insurer, in recognition of the outstanding technology deployed by Wipro and the high degree of customer satisfaction with the portal.

"We now have a single place in which to manage a complex hierarchy of access rights for different companies, groups and individual users," said a spokesperson for the U.K. insurer. "The solution enables our clients to manage their pension schemes in a more streamlined and secure way, saving them time and effort."