September 10, 2003 - CSOinformer, a monthly research newsletter focused on emerging information security trends, has announced the winners of its inaugural "Ahead of the Curve" Customer Success Story award program. The award was open to any solution provider willing to submit a verifiable customer success story, and was judged by an independent group of industry experts.
Oblix was the top selection of our panel of judges based upon its State of North Carolina customer success story, summarized below:
Since 2001, the State of North Carolina has been serious about investing in new security technologies for the various agencies and services the government supports. The IT department took a close look at how the State was deploying security practices and realized that there was no state-wide protocol for protecting state resources and data online. Each agency was controlled access to their own online applications and information, each with individual security policies and user passwords. Employees had several passwords, user information about them was out of date, and the state was burning dollars on passwords resets that could have been better utilized elsewhere.
The State ultimately selected Oblix's identity management and Web access control solution, Oblix NetPoint, to build a secure infrastructure for conducting operations on the Web. With NetPoint, the State can be sure that the right employees are accessing the right information and services online based on who they are and what they are allowed to do. Employees can be more productive with only one password to remember, and calls to the help desk for password resets have all but vanished. In fact, the state has been so successful with the project that it is now piloting a program to allow business to pay taxes to the state online.
We would also like to recognize the rest of our top five finalists for outstanding customer success stories:
Configuresoft, for its Enterprise Configuration Manager and its companion Security Update Manager solution. Configuresoft customer Halcrow uses these products to manage configurations and security policies within its global distributed network of 61 sites.
Foundstone, for its enterprise vulnerability management software Foundstone Enterprise and its customer success with the University of California at Irvine. UCI selected Foundstone to manage its entire vulnerability lifecycle for thousands of systems.
Communicator Inc., for its Hub ID extranet authorization solution. SecuritiesHub, a leading provider of financial information to the fixed income online community, uses Hub ID to provide 24,000 investors worldwide simplified access to the extranets of eight large Wall Street securities firms.
Cyber-Ark Software, for its Inter-Business Vault product. Lehman Brothers is using this product to enable secure collaboration with extremely sensitive documents.
CSOinformer is edited by Jim Reavis, founder of SecurityPortal and longtime industry analyst. This monthly newsletter is targeted at people who must take a strategic, multi-year view of the information security industry, and we promise insights you will not find anywhere else.
CSOinformer is a service of Reavis Consulting Group, and is published on the second Tuesday of each month.