Vordel - XML and SOA appliances for XML network management

Banking Case Study

Credit reference agency uses Vordel to securely extend business information services

Background

This Vordel client is a major credit reference agency with a turnover in excess of $1.8bn. The company works with more than 40,000 clients across diverse industries, including financial services, telecommunications, insurance, manufacturing and government. Its millions of customers rely on its consumer credit service to meet their financial management needs.

The agency's customers can access its information resources manually using a Web browser connecting to the company's extranet, where access control is provided by the Entrust GetAccess access management platform. In order to increase revenue potential and to streamline processing, the company is now also making its fraud and risk management products available via Web Services, enabling customers to integrate their own applications with its systems. The credit reference agency chose Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 as its Web Services integration platform.

Challenge

For ease of management, the company required that the same authorization rules that apply to existing extranet traffic are equally applied to the automated, XML-based Web Services traffic which is sent to BizTalk Server.

The company also required that the content of incoming and outgoing XML data was appropriate, so that the new XML interfaces were not vulnerable to XML denial-of-service attacks. Finally, it expected its usage of XML to become pervasive, and therefore required an extensible solution where authentication and authorization policies are enforceable at many entry and exit points for XML, not just one single chokepoint, but without sacrificing centralized management and reporting.

Why Vordel?

VordelDirector was chosen because of its proven interoperability with Entrust's platform, because of its range of support for XML-filtering and XML threat awareness, and because its agent-architecture enables centralized security management over multiple XML data streams. Using VordelDirector, the company now has the confidence to expose its credit validation systems to integrate with client systems, using standards-based XML interfaces.

Not only can the same credit checking products that were previously only exposed to manual access via Web browsers now be exposed as Web Services, but the same Entrust GetAccess security policies can be enforced over both access methods. Although the use of XML introduces new attack vulnerabilities, including XML denial-of-service attacks, VordelDirector prevents these threats.

Benefits

Realize a return on enterprise integration and security investments - leverage existing security investment by extending existing access management security policies to XML traffic.
Safeguard against increased risk, without increasing development and integration costs - Vordel's products remove need for costly coding, as policy configuration is through a console-based administration interface.
Leverage new standards and specifications - in this case, WS-Trust, SAML, and WS-Security were used.
Reduce maintenance costs - a single policy management point reduces the overall maintenance costs for security policy management and configuration.
Extend products and services to new customer groups - previously inaccessible due to the costly nature of using leased lines, VPNs and proprietary software.
Comply with regulatory guidelines for auditing and non-repudiation - address the internal and external mandates for regulatory compliance and maintain full evidential audit trail of each transaction.

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