One of the World's largest Airlines

Customer Project: Automated Identity Management in a Directory-Driven Architecture

The Challenge

The airline presides over one of the largest Novell networks in the world. As such, the IdM solution needed to work well with the Novell NetWare environment as well as connecting to such diverse systems as RACF, four Windows NT domains, one SAP system, the corporate directory and other LDAP directories, as well as three customer-developed applications (a Unisys-based booking system and 2 crew management systems).

The identity management solution that the company needed had to ensure comprehensive coverage of all of these security-critical systems.

A further challenge was that each of the 160,000 user profiles in the corporate directory contained more than 50 different attribute types per user. The implemented provisioning solution would have to be able to reference several input sources, consolidate them and continually update the directory in order to avoid security lapses and in order to enable precise auditing. This needed to be done without manual intervention by administrators . only total automation of the process would be adequate. From an administrative standpoint, the connected subsidiary companies had to be treated as separate organizations within one and the same identity management system . only this approach would ensure confidentiality and clean administration processes.