Accenture and Sun Microsystems have unveiled a set of
products they say will help businesses and governments protect
information systems fromsecurity threatsat an average 20%
reduction in cost.
The claim is based on field tests with pilot customers in the
insurance, retail, chemicals, telecoms and food industries over the
past eight months.
Mark Herring, vice president for software infrastructure at Sun,
said the bulk of the savings would come from the speed with which
users could deploy the five pre-built, field-tested,
implementation-ready security products.
"We have done a lot of the prework so customers can get fairly
good cost savings by not having to do it themselves," he said.
Other savings could be made in cheaper administration, less
complex identity
management, greater efficiency and flexibility, the automation
or elimination of processes, and faster and more secure
transactions.
Scott Rose, executive director of Accenture Innovation Center
for Sun Solutions, said the offering integrated
authentication and
access management technologies in an open architecture, which
meant that it could fit into the heterogeneous IT environments
found in most organisations.
The product set includes the Accenture Smart Identity Solution
for connecting existing applications such as human resource
applications with biometric capabilities. The other co-developed
products in the set handle compliance, secure
SOA, identity management and rapid SOA-based systems
development.
Accenture research has shown that identity management is among
the top security priorities for technology executives around the
world.
The
partnership is designed to increase each company's share of the
growing identity management market by combining the Accenture
business knowledge with Sun's technology.
"Part of what is unique about the combined offering is the
ability to provide global support to organisations deploying at
scales of 50,000 employees in 70 countries," said Rose.
He said this was in line with the trend of the past few years in
which organisations have moved from working at departmental level
to enterprise-wide deployments of security solutions.
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