Case Study: People's United Bank Saves Time, Costs through Identity and Access Management
The bottom line was getting new employees up to speed. That was the final selling point for People's United Bank to implement an identity access management solution. People's United Bank has implemented an identity access management solution that now automatically provisions 3,000 of its nearly 5,000 employees on the bank's systemIdentity access management (IAM) combines business processes, policies and technologies that enable institutions to provide secure access to any resource, efficiently control this access, respond faster to changing relationships, and -- most importantly -- protect confidential information from unauthorized users.
Greg Kyrytschenko, director of Information Security at the bank, explains that at the time work began on the project, People's United Bank was a $12 billion institution looking to grow through expansion. "Consequently, we needed the ability to rapidly provision users," he notes. Today, People's United, headquartered in Bridgeport, CT, has $21 billion in assets, with more than 300 branch locations in the Northeast.
Once People's United selected a solution for identity access management, the real work began. "We determined that first we needed to provision our retail branch staff, which at the time of initial deployment comprised 60 percent of the employee population," Kyrytschenko recalls. People's United partnered with the Courion Corporation (www.courion.com) to get the job done.
Getting Started
Kyrytschenko's team established roles for the bank's entire retail environment. During the onboarding process, a manager approves a new hire's access entitlements. The new employee then receives all of the appropriate access required to perform his/herjob. "One of the project goals was to get the user up and productive on their first day at work," Kyrytschenko notes.
An important part of the role management process is to periodically meet with each line of business to review defined access entitlements Kyrytschenko's team built the logic into the identity access management system, so that once the entitlements were determined, an employee could quickly and easily be provisioned. "We are now able to rapidly provision base level access (network and e-mail) for new employees," he explains. The Human Resource Information System, which determines an employee's employment status, is the authoritative source for the IAM solution.
Business Benefits
Kyrytschenko notes some of the immediate benefits from implementing IAM:
Kyrytschenko says the bank's long-term strategy is to begin to manage all resources in this manner, including Blackberries, phone lines, cellphones, and computer equipment such as laptops and desktops.
The bank's increased focus and defense in depth approach has, with the IAM, "kicked it up a couple of notches," he notes. "Our regulators, Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) are happy with the progress, but as with any regulator, they always want more." Eventually, Kyrytschenko would want to have the "big picture" of what every individual user has access to in the bank's environment.
Lessons Learned: