Success Story: SVA

Novell Cool Solutions: Feature

Digg This - Slashdot This Posted: 8 Nov 2006

SVA is the administrative body responsible for the social insurance of all self-employed workers in Austria, excluding those employed in agriculture. Based in Vienna and with 1,500 employees SVA provides pensions and health insurance schemes, automatically and compulsorily for all qualifying workers.

Challenge

SVA employees need to access up to 15 separate applications to carry out their jobs. To ensure high security for potentially sensitive information contained in these systems, the organization had implemented password-controlled access.

Paradoxically, the difficulty of remembering up to 15 regularly changing usernames and passwords made the entire network less secure, as employees would often choose overly simple passwords or even write their passwords down next to their workstation. Where the applications themselves set conditions for passwords to ensure that they were sufficiently complex, employees would often forget them - accounting for around five percent of all calls to the IT helpdesk.

Beyond the potential risk to data security, the existing password management policies were a significant drain on productivity. Employees might spend five to ten minutes each day logging into all of their applications - in the worst-case scenario, this would represent a total loss of more than 5,000 person-days per year.

Novell Solution

The main goals for SVA were to improve application and data security and to reduce the time taken to access applications. Working with its regular technology partner, Madras Computer, SVA selected Novell SecureLogin to support single sign-on for its users.

Adolf Koppensteiner, Head of IT at SVA, remarked, "We estimate that each user now spends around 90 seconds logging in each day, compared with up to ten minutes before we implemented Novell SecureLogin. Multiplied across all our users, this means that we could be saving around 4,000 person-days of productive time each year."

Novell SecureLogin provides password-controlled access to 15 applications for 1,400 users at SVA. The Novell solution creates a unique password for each user to each application, and in many cases automatically changes the passwords when they expire. The single sign-on environment encompasses the 15 core applications used by SVA, including communication tools, specialist insurance systems and SAP ERP applications.

"The implementation of Novell SecureLogin was relatively quick and simple, since there was no need to revise the existing applications in any way," said Adolf Koppensteiner, Head of IT, SVA. "We estimate that it takes about one person-day to integrate a new application into the single sign-on environment, so the solution can easily grow to meet our future needs."

The IT helpdesk now very rarely receives calls about lost or forgotten passwords. SVA estimates that there has been a five percent drop in total call volumes since the implementation, freeing up skilled operators for other issues.

"With Novell SecureLogin we have achieved our goals for improved security and efficiency," said Koppensteiner. "The response from both users and management has been extremely positive."

To read the entire success story, see: http://www.novell.com/success/sva.html

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