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The requirement

While security is critical to any organisation, there are few businesses that can say it produced not just competitive advantage but a whole new line of business. Trading portal Covisint is one such company.

Covisint was developed in 2001 by motor industry giants General Motors (GM), Ford and Daimler-Chrysler, and bought by software development giant Compuware in February 2004.

From its roots as an online marketplace for the motor industry, where manufacturers could be put in contact with their suppliers, it has branched out into providing additional services for customers using its exchange. And by managing authenticated access and identity federation for hundreds of thousands of users, it has been able to begin expansion into new markets.

Covisint knew that in the sensitive area of security, massive customers would be wary of outsourcing their identity management to a third party. Daimler-Chrysler alone has up to 60,000 users in 20,000 supplier organisations accessing 150 applications.

To put these worries to rest, Covisint knew it had to provide a more sophisticated service than it could develop itself. To that end it turned to security systems and services provider RSA Security.

The solution

"When we first started we used a lot of Oracle," explains David Miller, Covisint's chief information security officer. "But we moved over to RSA because security was the only thing they did, and they did it better. When I talked to them about security issues, they understood where I was coming from."

Using RSA's ClearTrust web access management and Federated Identity Management (FIM) tool, Covisint has built up a base of 225,000 users in 96 countries. Covisint authenticates users logging into its portal using ClearTrust. FIM then allows organisations to share user identity information across business boundaries, so users only have to sign in once.

The benefits

As users require only one user name and password to access the entire industry, the cost of provisioning each identity can be spread across all the customers Covisint contacts. This brings substantial savings, given that half of help desk costs stem from lost passwords.

Covisint expects to broaden its customer base to the healthcare sector within the next two quarters and to financial services by the end of 2005 - potentially increasing its customer base eight-fold. "General Motors has 1.1 million employees and is the largest purchaser of healthcare in the United States," says Miller. "There is room for customers from one industry to log in and cross over."

Both the health and finance industries are subject to far more stringent regulatory controls than the automotive sector. Potentially a doctor could, for example, access a patient's health insurance records. Despite the sensitive nature of such a request, Miller is confident Covisint's best practice in the automotive industry will translate into new markets. n