Stolt Offshore, one of the world's largest contractors to the oil and gas industry, has selected Informer Systems Ltd's (ISL) Secure IT 3000 network authentication system to protect sensitive data held on its central networks, when accessed by remote staff.
The system currently supports a user licence of 250, and is being predominantly used for e-mail access.
Service Delivery Supervisor for Stolt Offshore, David Melvin, commented: "We decided on ISL's Secure IT 3000 following a recommendation from a supplier. The solution was competitive and easy to configure alongside our existing Microsoft SQL 7 Server."
"The system gives easy and reliable remote access for our growing population of dial-in users, and when fully deployed will enable access to e-mail and data irrespective of where it resides.''
Under the system, remote users access their nearest Stolt Offshore office, where they are authenticated in the local Domain by ISL's Secure IT 3000 communication servers. This server holds the security credentials for all users.
Each communications server receives these credentials from the central Secure IT 3000 database across the wide area network (WAN) and returns audit data back along the same route. In the event of failure of the WAN, each Secure IT 3000 communication server acts independently until the WAN is restored.
Secure IT 3000 has been designed as a multi-location authentication server with emphasis on security, resilience and ease of management. Both security and resilience has been ensured by allowing all authentication to take place on the local Domain, independent of the central database or the WAN, so that a loss of either the WAN or database will not impact on the service to the users.
System management is to a single non-proprietary scaleable database (Microsoft SQL server) where all user information and audit trails are held. Changes to this database are distributed to all locations directly from the database, and may only be initiated by an authorised Secure IT 3000 administrator.
Secure IT 3000 supports authentication to: Microsoft's RAS/RRAS and RADIUS authentication protocols to; Routers, Firewalls and Remote Access Servers. Authentication options include Racal Watchword and ActivCard DES tokens, SecurDial software token, smart cards and Biometric authentication.
