Security and efficiency in all branches IDENTITY lifecycle management (ILM) has helped retailer JD Group achieve security and efficiency in all its branches, says Iniel Dreyer, security advisor to the group.

"If you walk around the IT department floor there is a constant buzz in the air that we must ensure that branches can trade," he said at the ITWeb Security Summit.

"Then you walk into the operations executive`s office and the main talking point is to reduce administrative overheads and use staff more effectively to focus on new technologies and enhance the consumer`s shopping experience."

The JD Group has just more than 1 000 branches, with 10 000 PC users across 10 brands, all supported by a single IT department.

"As you can imagine the JD Group has various systems that require a user to have some sort of identity," Dreyer says.

"Each one of these systems has its own set of authentication and permission controls which determines what actions a specific user can or can`t perform."

Dreyer defines identity management as "the glue that allows various systems to securely and effectively share identity information", eliminating the need for manual intervention to provision user identities across an array of different systems.

He says the JD Group has implemented it in user provisioning and de-provisioning, self-service password management and identity synchronisation.

"Within the JD Group we`ve seen an improvement from one week to almost real-time to provision new users," he says. In addition, identities are now provisioned effectively and securely across all business critical systems with little or no human intervention.

Branch efficiency has improved because users now have a single identity across applications and don`t have to spend hours on the phone to helpdesks to find user names or reset passwords. This means IT staff can now focus on their real jobs to ensure system uptime and have time for research and development.