Alcat el-Luce nt OmniAcce ss 8550
Web Services Gateway
Secure and auditable web services for financial institutions
Multiplesystemsin the financialindustry— loan and mortgageapplications, risk reporting,offline batch processing,Internetbanking,enterpriseresource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) — operate together to process billions of daily transactions. Technology is imperative to keep the financial engines running. However, when using a variety of solutions,it is difficultto integrateenterpriseclassauthentication,authorization and auditing into a group of disparate IT systems and still maintain information security, corporate governance and regulatory compliance.
The leadin g technology to facilitate interoperability between disparate business systems is to use a common element through which all services can operate. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is widely used in the fina ncial industry as a flexible modula r framework designed to enable interoperability as a service over a network (Internet, intranet, extranet). The greatest strengths of SOA environments are providing business agility and IT system re-use through flexibility and openness.
The true burden of all financial institutions is to have the ability to easily and accurately prove that each transaction is completed according to regulatory and corporat e governance standards.
However, like a double-edged sword, it is also a SOA’sgreatest weakness, because by default, an SOA has minimal authenticationand authorization mechanisms and lacks functions critical to financial institutio ns such as consolidated auditing and policy enforcement capabilities. The sensitive nature of the information routinely handled by financial institutions demands enterprise-wide role-based authentication of users, run-time authorization of transactions,and consolidated audit trails to create a historical record for corporate governance and to demonstrate regulatory compliance.
“… any [SOA] system is inherently insecure the moment you open it up to the outside world….”
Butler Group
OMNIACCESS 8550 WEB SERVICES GATEWAY
The Alcatel-Lucent ® OmniAccess™ 8550 Web Services Gateway (WSG), deployed as in Figure 1, provides reliable enterprise-wide user-centric stateful policy enforcement with consolidated audit trails to web-enabled services, data, applications and business processes. Once deployed, the OmniAccess 8550 WSG provides a secure application-indep endent infrastructure to share web services between financial institu tions and their partn ers regardless if the services are local or external (outside the firewall). The benefits gained are corpora te-wide security risk manage ment capabili ties, end-to-end enterprise-class data and identity security (encryption, digitial signing, and single identity), and stateful (multi-transaction) run-time policy enforcement to ensure compliance with consolidated audit trails to demonstrate compliance.
Figure 1. Example OmniAccess 8550 Web Services Gateway Deployment
Remote Datacenter
eSales Portal |
Sales Force |
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Mortgage Application |
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Batch Processing
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OA8550 |
WSG |
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Primary Datacenter
CRM Systems |
OA8550 WSG |
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Internet Banking
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OA8550 WSG |
ERP Systems |
Financial Systems |
Alcatel-Lucent | OmniAccess 8550 Web Services Gateway 3