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Germany’s National Meteorological Service logoGermany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD)

NetIQ Identity Manager supports seamless integration with business-critical systems, providing automatic, role-based staff access

Germany’s National Meteorological Service logo

Outcomes

  • Enables super-fast user account administration
  • Frees up IT staff to focus on higher-value tasks
  • Simplifes fulflment of compliance requirements around data security

Challenge

To maintain high levels of security and meet compliance requirements, DWD must ensure that each of its 2,500 employees can only access the systems relevant to their specific roles. Equally, granting new hires fast access to the appropriate systems is essential in avoiding delays to the delivery of vital information to organizations and individuals. To reduce the risk of confidential data being stolen, DWD must also revoke access for former staff as soon as their employment ends.

The IT-Communication Unit of DWD explains: “Our staff uses a wide variety of systems to perform day-to-day tasks, and each user requires access to a different subset of applications. Managing access to all of these systems manually would require an enormous amount of work and be extremely time-consuming.”

Details

Solution

The University selected OpenText NetIQ Identity Manager to integrate its various OpenText NetIQ eDirectory and Microsoft Active Directory instances and create common user credentials across its entire estate of IT systems. “We regularly look at every single software product we use and ask quite simply: Is it worth it?” said Dave Marriott, team leader for EndPoint Systems at the University of Westminster. “NetIQ Identity Manager is one of those solutions that does exactly what it says on the tin, and that’s why we continue to see value in it. It has allowed us to standardize login processes and credentials across a broad array of systems, and it has removed a large amount of paperwork associated with user management. 

Whenever new people join the organization, we can provide them with access to all of the systems they need to perform their roles from day one—ensuring that they can deliver weather information to organizations and individuals without delay.

IT-Communication Unit
DWD

NetIQ Identity Manager synchronizes identity information across multiple directories, creating a single master identity for each unique user and eliminating most of the manual tasks associated with user management. For an organization with a large and rapidly changing user population, this represents a significant reduction in IT administration. NetIQ Identity Manager also enables the IT department to rapidly and accurately provision new user accounts, and users have the same credentials across multiple systems without compromising security.

The University has updated its NetIQ Identity Manager environment twice in recent years— first to simplify the migration of all student mail accounts to Google and second as part of a broader modernization program. “Moving to the latest version ensured lower support costs and also meant that we would have access to prebuilt drivers for the latest applications,” said Marriott. “We are running NetIQ Identity Manager on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server virtualized on VMware ESX Server. In fact, 90 to 95 percent of our entire server estate is now virtualized, which means that we can freely interchange hardware without affecting the services.”

Nearly all internal systems at the University link to NetIQ Identity Manager, from the student record system to the staff ID card system. When the University decided to move to cloud-based delivery for its Blackboard Academic Suite, it was also able to use NetIQ Identity Manager to authenticate users to this external service.

Results

The solution from OpenText™ (formerly Micro Focus) and G + H Systems plays a vital role in enabling DWD to meet its identity management challenges efficiently and effectively.

DWD illustrates: “Whenever new people join the organization, we can provide them with access to all of the systems they need to perform their roles from day one—ensuring that they can deliver weather information to organizations and individuals without delay. Equally, when staff leave the organization, we immediately terminate their system access to mitigate the risk of sensitive data being breached.”

Automation accelerates user account administration, reduces the risk of human error and frees up IT staff, meaning that they have more time to dedicate to value add tasks.

DWD regularly updates the software to capitalize on new functionality included with each release. In the future, the organization plans to introduce role-based provisioning to further streamline the process of setting up new user accounts.

DWD concludes: “Relying on NetIQ Identity Manager makes our lives much easier and allows us to focus on our primary goal— serving the meteorological needs of the German public efficiently and effectively.” 

Relying on NetIQ Identity Manager makes our lives much easier and allows us to focus on our primary goal—serving the meteorological needs of the German public efficiently and effectively.

IT-Communication Unit
DWD

About NetIQ

NetIQ provides security solutions that help organizations with workforce and consumer identity and access management at enterprise-scale. By providing secure access, effective governance, scalable automation, and actionable insight, NetIQ customers can achieve greater confidence in their IT security posture across cloud, mobile, and data platforms.

Visit the NetIQ homepage to learn more. Watch video demos on our NetIQ Unplugged YouTube channel.

NetIQ is part of Cybersecurity, an OpenText line of business.

About Germany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD)

Germany’s National Meteorological Service logo

Germany’s National Meteorological Service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), is the government body tasked with providing meteorological information to help protect organizations and individuals from the effects of adverse weather.

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