Pirean to build integrated security, access and management platform for Aviva UK

(31/07/2009)

Aviva Plc is the world's 5th largest Insurance group with over 50 million customers across 28 countries. Pirean has announced the commencement of a major project for Aviva UK to migrate bespoke legacy applications onto a new standards-based IBM centric virtualisation platform. The move will help reduce new product development times for the Aviva Business IT unit from an average of 6 months to as little as 7 days.

The work carried out by Pirean, an IBM Tivoli AAA rated partner for IT Service and Security Management, uses a combination of IBM Tivoli Access Manager, IBM Tivoli Identity Manager, Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager and other complimentary IBM Tivoli software to help Aviva create a highly manageable framework for product development based on IBM’s leading platform virtualization technologies.

“Our work with Pirean is helping us deliver a new focus on web service that enables us to better interact with our partners and customers in an environment where security and speed to market are absolutely paramount,” comments Ian Chapple, Director of IT Strategy & Architecture for Aviva UK, “Pirean have a strong technical understanding of our environment and a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions. The detailed design work they have carried out so far gives us a clear indication of the benefits of the new system backed by a carefully phased implementation strategy to ensure constant availability of our critical applications during the process.”

Aviva UK selected Pirean as lead implementation partner following the success of a 3 month detailed design and planning project. As Mike Cartwright, CTO for Pirean explains, “The new solution will carefully migrate a number of Aviva’s highly bespoke, business critical systems onto IBM based equivalents and will create a standards based development environment using virtualisation technology to help meet capacity, reliability and security requirements.”

One of the first benefits of the Pirean designed solution will be a new consultant’s portal under development by Aviva for the UK’s 25,000 brokers and financial advisers. The solution will also underpin services for helping larger corporations better manage employee entitlements and coverage via the web.

Cartwright, CTO for Pirean commented, “As more organisations deploy critical web based applications, there is a growing requirement to build integrated security, access and management platforms designed from the outset to grow and adapt.

“In the past, many organisations have tended to deploy new web apps without due consideration to managing both old and new applications cohesively. Many have often had to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time which ultimately leads to problems as business and technology requirements change.”

“By building security, access control and management into the very start of the development phase and using a coherent process from cradle to grave, organisations like Aviva are able to realise significant cost and process benefits while minimising the risk of unsecured “rogue” applications causing unforeseen problems in the future” Cartwright adds.

The Pirean solution will allow Aviva’s Business IT to use standardised templates for development of new business applications with a unified and centrally managed access and security model. The implementation and migration of the first legacy business applications is due to go fully live in Q1 of 2010.

Related topics:  Data management and data security   Internet and Web security 

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