Introduction:
ASR Netherlands provides insurance services to personal, business and institutional customers through their own high-performance channels and via intermediaries and other partners.

Business Objective:
ASR corporate strategy is to position the firm as a general intermediary insurer delivering a range of products to its specialist channel partners who can then focus on their core activities. In order to meet the needs of these intermediaries, ASR implemented a SOA based approach to deliver products and services online to partners, alongside the provision of services to its own

Business Challenge:
ASR Netherlands needed to extend online services of a commercially sensitive nature to partners within a highly regulated financial sector. The challenge they faced was to ensure that the delivery of these new online services would introduce greater operational efficiencies, thereby reducing the overall costs of doing business within its distribution channel, whilst at the same time ensuring the company maintained a competitive advantage over rival insurers.

Technical Challenge:
Given the diversity of partners and customers accessing its insurance products, ASR needed to validate a multitude of different authentication and authorization protocols. A solution was also required to support a single store of user profile information - built into the RSA Identity Management platform - that was applicable to both Web browser traffic (HTML, forms data) and XML-based traffic (XML, SOAP). The solution also needed to be future-proof, supporting both current transport-level security standard (SSL) extending to leading-edge message-based security standards (WS-Security). Finally a software solution was required that would complement the overall IT strategy of VMWare virtualization and use of a blade server environment.

Benefits/Results:
Re-use existing security infrastructure obtaining return on assets - avoid the cost and extra management complexity of new "silos" of users and policies. The solution allows users management and policy management to be common across both Web browser traffic and XML Web Services traffic.

Complement the corporate strategy of a Customer-centric approach - This security solution allows ASR Netherlands to extend services to partners. Without strong authentication and authorization, as well as an audit trail, this would be impossible.

Reduced costs and faster time to market to existing and new markets - With Vordel, ASR has the flexibility to update security policies centrally, implement software upgrades without hard coding and without firmware upgrades, and can easily scale the application of security to new partners and customers as and when required.

Comply with Financial Services regulatory guidelines for auditing and non-repudiation - the use of strong authentication and authorization, as well as keeping an audit trail of all transactions, satisfies regulatory requirements.