Government Technology - March 2008 - (Page NOVELL3)

Advertising Supplement Case Study Setting a New Standard End-users access applications and manage system identities without administrative hassles at the Nevada Division of Welfare and Supportive Services. A culture of simple data access, quick approvals and secure application delivery now reigns at the Nevada Division of Welfare and Supportive Services. The division works tirelessly to provide quality, timely and temporary services enabling Nevada families, the disabled and elderly to achieve their highest levels of self-sufﬁciency. The 1,200-employee agency is transitioning from its costly mainframe environment to a serverhosted environment. The change is simplifying IT by consolidating application maintenance, extending functionality and ease of use to the end-users. However, the division’s 17 unconnected applications each required separate user administration and security models. Users had to maintain passwords and IDs for each application, making access cumbersome and insecure. Agency IT personnel had to manually update user information in all of the systems, a process that typically consumed two weeks. Security is a primary concern because the agency manages sensitive client data related to public assistance and child support. The division aimed to deliver those applications to external users in afﬁliated organizations and soon to childcare providers, making ironclad security even more critical. The agency’s new server-based Web applications lacked encryption capabilities, which it needed to prevent unauthorized access from external sources. The division implemented a combination of Novell’s Identity Manager, Access Manager, SecureLogin, and leveraged Novell eDirectory to simplify user access, improve security and reduce IT administration. The change produced dramatic results. The solution synchronizes user identity information across 14 different applications, including HR, ﬁnancial and social services systems. This eliminated hours of manual updating and improved user information accuracy. The agency reduced user administration time by 80 percent and reassigned two full-time equivalent IT personnel to other important projects. The IT team now provisions new users 90 percent faster and deploys new applications in days, rather than weeks, due to Identity Manager’s automated functionality. At a time of increasing demands on government performance and shrinking budgets, Novell solutions offered a low-cost mechanism for overhauling administrative functionality. Governments can easily plug Novell technology into their existing systems, providing a secure identity and access management solution for all of an agency’s dissimilar systems. Novell solutions empower governments to do in minutes what took weeks in the past. Automated functionality liberates employees to accomplish more strategic tasks to better their agencies. The agency’s Novell solution gave workers secure, continually available access to applications for performing their jobs at maximum efﬁciency. The division became the ﬁrst agency in Nevada to provide secure, anywhere access for employees to application data without the use of VPN technology. Each user maintains one password to access all necessary division applications and in some cases, other divisions’ applications, making the division’s users the ﬁrst Nevada employees to receive that functionality. The division is currently implementing a child-care application, which it plans on securely extending via the Web to child-care providers in the state. The solution’s automated workﬂow capabilities will soon enable select users, rather than IT personnel, to grant access authority. This lets managers grant authority to their employees. Naturally they know their employees’ needs better than anyone in the organization. Governments often struggle to transition entrenched workers to a new system. The opposite was true of the division’s Novell implementation. Employees immediately embraced the solution. It made their jobs easier by providing secure access to the division’s numerous systems and applications, and many claim this freed up “brain space” so they could concentrate on more signiﬁcant initiatives. Interest is spreading to other Nevada agencies as the division’s results impress observers. Among those agencies/organizations is the Nevada Enterprise Architecture Committee, which hopes beneﬁts similar to the division’s might be realized if solutions are extended beyond the individual divisions. could give each user a “proximity card” to carry. As soon as the user leaves the station, the system stops sensing the user’s proximity card and the session automatically terminates. Once the user enters a single password, Novell Access Manager ™ recognizes the user, securely channeling him or her to the right applications. The solution offers users the same experience whether they are inside or outside the ﬁrewall. Remote or mobile employees use the same process to access the applications they would if they were at their desks. That means employees only need to learn one way to do their jobs. Identity Nucleus The complex structure of government often makes keeping track of the various identities and functions of thousands of employees difﬁcult. Novell eliminates that struggle with Novell eDirectory™, a centralized secure identity vault of employees that maintains the identities, functions and all other useful information on each of them. Finding employees with special ranks or skill sets in government can be like navigating a labyrinth. Novell technology lets eligible users search the directory to ﬁnd the person they need. It shows who ranks below and above them. For example, if management searches for a social worker with a certain skill set, the directory provides names of employees who ﬁt the necessary requirements. Novell identity management and access control solutions improve efﬁciency for government employees — from end-users to administrators. And with Novell solutions, IT staff and managers can sleep at night knowing this efﬁciency does not come at the expense of security. 3

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - March 2008

Government Technology - March 2008 Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile On the Scene Four Questions for... Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers Let's [Not] Get Physical No Data Left Behind Conservation King Community Drug Test Reinventing the System Better Late Than Never Closing the Deal Spectrum Products Personal Computing signal:noise Digital Communities The Expanding Focus of Digital Communities The Digital Imperative Hot Fusion Redefining Municipal Wireless Made in the USA Bridge Detectives The 2008 Agenda

Government Technology - March 2008

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