Utility Case Study

National water utility uses VordelSecure to securely extend Web Services to corporate and residential markets

Background

Vordel's customer is a large European water supplier with annual revenues in excess of €140m. The water company is responsible for the supply of water for domestic and commercial use in a European capital city, as well as 24 satellite towns in the surrounding suburbs, supplying high quality drinking water to approximately 3 million people. The company also acts as an application service provider (ASP) to other companies within the water group.

The challenges

The firm needed to address demand for real time system interaction with its clients, not just via a Web portal but also through an automated delivery platform. To create greater value and accessibility for its customers, the company elected to place most of its customer interaction online, including services such as meter data, invoices, contract initiation and termination, and service requests.

Due to the sensitive nature of this data, the company required the online services to be confidential, secure, and authenticated.

The company's network for the collation and transmission of aggregated company data consists of a diverse range of hardware and software products - including Oracle databases, Windows 2003 Server, SQL Server, Microsoft .NET BizTalk servers and LDAP Directories.

In addition to the ability to provide secure access to a company extranet, the water supplier also sought to associate XML messages on its network with the identity of the person or company generating them. To achieve this it required a security solution that could span both website security and Web Services security.

Why Vordel?

The water supplier built a Web Services infrastructure to extract relevant data from SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 8i, and collate and aggregate this information in Microsoft .NET BizTalk. The data is then exposed to authorized users only, who have authenticated themselves using a password or digital certificate at the portal.

To maintain security, VordelSecure verifies certificates from Certificate Revocation Lists published in the LDAP directory. VordelSecure secures internal XML traffic between Biztalk, SQL Server and Oracle. The support for SNMP allows the delivery of security system alerts to the installed HP OpenView based Network management platform.

Benefits

• Savings on software development costs - VordelSecure secured the integration across the various network products with no requirement for additional coding or assimilation.
• Quick deployment and time to market - the standards-based solution avoided any proprietary technologies and resulted in a quicker deployment time for the secure payment platform.
• Separation of security processing and management from business logic - best-practice approach to ensure appropriate levels of security.
• Compliance with regulatory guidelines for auditing and non-repudiation - since all transactions are logged and all XML messages tied to the end user's identity, an evidential audit trail provides the desired level of accountability, and improves the organization's overall risk-management process

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