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"CA's Identity and Access Management solutions have helped us to efficiently and effectively secure access to authorised users while enabling audit and compliance reporting mechanisms in support of corporate initiatives and government regulations." |
The big picture
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) is responsible for producing some of the most popular movies and TV programs in the world, from Spiderman to Seinfeld.
The company, part of the Sony Corporation of America, is involved in all aspects of the entertainment industry — from operating studio facilities and marketing entertainment products to developing new entertainment services for broadband distribution.
Digital content is at the core of the group's growth plans for the future, which also include revitalizing Sony on a global basis and improving organizational structure.
Content is king
Although the internet presents Sony and other entertainment companies with new opportunities, it has also made the movie and TV business even more competitive. As a result, the sector is under increasing pressure to capture and retain audiences with fresh, innovative programming.
This presents companies such as SPE with two key challenges: to produce new content quickly in response to market needs; and second, to ensure that new programs and films are not leaked before their official release.
This is often difficult because the process of producing and distributing new content can be complex. To release new products quickly, many production processes are carried out in tandem — meaning content may be distributed to multiple people, usually over the Internet.
Keeping track of this content is a constant challenge for SPE but one that must be overcome. For even small pieces of content reaching unauthorized users can result in millions of dollars in terms of business loss, along with potential legal ramifications and brand dilution.
In addition to protecting its intellectual property, SPE also needed to ensure that it was meeting corporate reporting policies as well as federal regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Corporate policies are set by Sony Headquarters in Japan, and are often time-consuming to implement without a centralized process.
Protecting its assets
To secure the distribution of valuable content across public networks, SPE needed to control both access and editing rights for staff and external stakeholders.
The company also wanted to be able to dictate that only people with specified jobs could access different pieces of content, and ensure that users were correctly identified, authorized and authenticated before any content was made available to them.
To achieve this, SPE needed a central repository of information about all users, which could integrate with existing business systems.
Inability to fully and centrally manage the SPE user base had already resulted in significant operational cost increases and staff dissatisfaction — especially on user account access management and password reset.
Establishing access rights
To overcome this, SPE has deployed a single global identity and access management (IAM) solution from CA.
At the heart of the solution, which is based on CA eTrust SiteMinder and CA Identity Manager, is a repository of information about more than 3,000 SPE employees, partners and contractors, together with information about what content they can access.
This information can be integrated with any of SPE's third-party Web solutions, meaning that a single, centrally managed repository can provide access rights information for any number of applications.
This enables SPE to gain the maximum possible benefit from its investment in third-party software products, by linking directly into applications, rather than developing custom links. As Heidi Kujawa, Director of Enterprise Applications at SPE, explains, "Not only did eTrust SiteMinder and Identity Manager have the industry recognition and market leadership we wanted, it is also an open and integrated solution that works seamlessly with third party products."
As employees and content change, managers now only need to update access information once — in the central repository — and the new permissions are reflected across the SPE infrastructure.
Making efficiency gains
This centralized approach means that access to SPE's valuable digital content is now managed through a single set of policies and access rights. All users are subject to the same authentication checks, regardless of what content they access, or what application they are using.
As a result, SPE has been able to:
- Drastically reduce management costs
- Simplify core business processes
- Ensure continuous compliance with regulatory and security policies set by head office
Having a single solution to control identity management is highly efficient, and SPE is able to add, on average, three new applications into the IAM service every six weeks, ensuring that the business reaps the benefits of the CA solution as widely as possible.
The IAM solution has also benefited SPE's end users, who are able to manage some of the information in the repository themselves. They can also sign on to multiple systems using just one authentication, rather than remembering multiple passwords. This has also reduced support costs, since IT staff spend less time resetting forgotten passwords.
CA's Identity and Access Management solutions have provided Sony Pictures Entertainment with an excellent foundation for building our applications infrastructure," comments Kujawa.
They were instrumental in transforming our ability to support digitization and secure distribution of our content. This has helped us to efficiently and effectively secure access to authorized users while enabling audit and compliance reporting mechanisms in support of corporate initiatives and government regulations."
Content posted on: 16 July 2007
