As a result of deregulation, consolidation and growing competition, the utilities industry has become an increasingly global and networked market. This trend has led to heightened concerns about data security just as governments around the world are mandating new IT security measures, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S and the Data Protection Act in the UK. New industry standards, such as BS7799 in the UK and BS7799-2 and ISO 17799 worldwide, are also driving organizations to adopt stronger security controls. In the case of the government mandates, failure to comply could result in fines and/or legal action.
Compliance has been a challenge for many utilities, primarily due to the high costs, time and resources required to secure complex legacy applications and IT environments. At the same time, the threat of terrorism has heightened concerns about physical security. Now, a growing number of energy companies are discovering that Imprivata OneSign solutions offer a practical and affordable means to achieve regulatory compliance while also improving both logical and physical security, reducing IT help desk costs, eliminating password management problems, and improving user productivity.
Imprivata OneSign solutions support the unique requirements of energy companies in the following ways:
Imprivata OneSign Authentication Management
- Authenticates both local and remote access users as they logon to the enterprise network;
- Supports user accountability by recording all user and application events in log files, providing a monitoring trail accessible to administrators;
- Ensures compliance to meet regulatory requirements, safeguards access, and prevents the misuse of confidential patientinformation;
- Supports strong authentication, including ID tokens, smart cards, proximity cards and biometrics technologies;
- Ensures policy enforcement because it requires no change in end user behavior;
- Supports fast user authentication and logout on shared workstations to strengthen security infinancial servicesfacilities where multiple users share one or more workstations.
Imprivata OneSign Single Sign-On
- Extends user authentication protection to include software applications;
- Single sign-on to all legacy, Web, Java,client/server, mainframe and terminal-based applications;
- Reduces costs and improves user productivity by sharply reducing help desk and password reset calls;
- Automates the process of implementing strong password policies.
- Integrates building and network access systems for unified enterprise security management.
- Consolidates identities between physical access systems and IT directories to enable one converged policy for allowing or denying network access based on a user's physical location, organizational role and/or employee status.
- Provides integrated and centralized user access monitoring and reporting capabilities in order to better demonstrate regulatory compliance.