BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina

BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina

Saving 5,000 hours of staff time by automating security processes

Solution components
· IBM® Tivoli® Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On
· IBM Tivoli Access Manager for e-business

IBM Business Partner
· Prolifics

The need
“BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina is an insurance provider and subject to HIPAA compliance,” says Ken Lukasewicz, a technical manager for Identity Management Operations at BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina. “It's the driver behind our security practice to maintain our customer member data in a secure fashion.”

The solution
“[IBM®] Tivoli® Access Manager has given us a secure environment that protects our customer data, our member data, from those that are not supposed to see it,” says Lukasewicz. “It allows us to perform administration in a centralized point. It has acted as the foundation for our enterprise security strategy going forward, enabling us to move forward with enterprise single sign-on and federated identity management.”

“Tivoli Access Manager is helping us achieve these benefits by allowing us to centralize the granting of access and restricting access to applications and data,” says Lukasewicz. “It's also allowing us to reduce the amount of time that we spend doing these tasks by being able to automate these processes and move them away from a more manual process. For one application that we've targeted for [Tivoli Access Manager for] Enterprise Single Sign-On, removing that redundancy will remove about 5,000 hours of employee time.”

The benefit
“The benefits we've seen from the implementation of TAM [Tivoli Access Manager] relate to compliance and being able to report on that compliance to be able to see who has access to what data and who is accessing that data,” says Lukasewicz. “The scalability for TAM for BlueCross has been the ability to do more with the same amount of headcount, the same amount of infrastructure. We can handle all the access that we're currently experiencing, predict the growth that we're going to see in the future and maintain an environment that is stable and secure for our employees and our members.”

“During the implementation of TAMeb [Tivoli Access Manager for e-business], we worked very closely with Prolifics to support us and provide the partnership we needed,” says Lukasewicz. “They worked with us hand-in-hand onsite with our employees throughout to make sure that the implementation was successful and worked according to plan.”

“BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina has a long-standing history using IBM products in our IT environment,” says Lukasewicz. “Choosing the IBM Tivoli security suite was a natural extension of that, fitting very nicely and integrating very closely with our current infrastructure in other areas of the business.”

For more information
To learn more about IBM security solutions, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/tivoli/security