Egypt's leading private bank turns to IBM Identity Access Management solution to increase security controls and improve operational efficiency in managing users' identities

Cairo, Egypt – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the Commercial International Bank–Egypt (CIB), a leading private bank in Egypt, has selected IBM Security to protect and enhance identity and access governance management for the bank’s systems, applications and data. The IBM solution will allow the bank to enhance employee performance and ensure access to the bank’s applications and data within a controlled security framework.

As the workforce in Egypt becomes more mobile, managing and securing multiple identities across businesses has become more complex on mobile and IoT devices, desktop environments and internet services. At the same time, these solutions must address business needs such as role management, compliance and audit reporting and integration of various user populations.

CIB has significantly grown in the past few years, expanding its reach and automating its banking services and operations, resulting to increased number of internal employee identities over several technology platforms, systems and applications; hence introducing a more complex magnitude of efforts that required to manage, govern and control identities. Additionally, the manual-based identity management process was impacting the overall user experience, leading into increased service desk costs and delays in access provisioning, lifecycle and password management.

In line with the bank’s commitment to provide the best in class services, CIB turned to IBM solutions to be able to quickly and drastically improve its banking processes through a complete identity and access management framework that provides centralized services to manage the entire cycle flowing through the bank’s platform of applications; including automation for user management, user provisioning, lifecycle and password management.

The IBM identity access management solutions, IBM Security Identity Governance and Intelligence and IBM Security Access Manager, will proactively determine the right level of access and any violations that may impact or introduce risk; while providing access to applications, and ensuring only necessary access is given to employees to support customers and bank operations.

These IBM identity and access management solutions allow full automation and control of access to applications and systems operated by the CIB, and automate employee account access based on employee position, role and department. The solution significantly reduces the time to provision new users and when employees leave, all accounts are deactivated, creating a seamless and secure administrative process. Additionally, the solution is expected to introduce operational efficiencies and reduction of accounts’ and identity administration turn-around-times.

“CIB selected IBM to help enhance productivity and collaboration by adopting a more agile environment that is securely designed to further enhance the user experience, governance and controls over identities,” said Shatssy Hassan, Chief Security Officer for CIB. “The solution will also help us streamline identity access management process through introducing automation and reducing manual-based process, to increase operational efficiency and productivity.”

With the IBM solution, CIB will also be able to provide common authentication, authorization and access control and enforcement across its entire IT operations. The bank will also gain operational efficiency with automated, streamlined processes that help swiftly add, change and remove authorizations and adjust licensing costs associated with staffing levels and related responsibilities.

“In our world where data is the new natural resource, it is critical for businesses to exploit their data while maintaining a robust and reliable data security strategy. IBM is working closely with its clients in Egypt, banks and financial institutions amongst, to help them leverage the best in class security solutions and support them create and manage complex ecosystems in the face of market transition,” said Amr Talaat, General Manager, IBM Egypt. He added: “IBM is supporting their path to digital transformation to allow them to become increasingly agile while continuing to offer innovative services to their customers to gain a competitive edge in the Egyptian market.”

Additionally, CIB will be able to implement automated security controls which match some requirements of global regulations, standards and best practices like ISO, PCI-DSS, etc. and all customer data and account operations will be managed and accessed with higher security and governance controls.

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© Press Release 2017