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Although the internet presents Sony and other entertainment companies with new opportunities, it has also made the movie and TV business even more competitive. As a result, the sector is under increasing to capture and retain audiences with fresh, innovative programming.
This presents companies such as SPE with two key challenges: to produce new content quickly in response to market needs; and second, to ensure that new programmes and films are not leaked before their official release.
This is often difficult because the process of producing and distributing new content can be complex. To release new products quickly, many production processes are carried out in tandem — meaning content may be distributed to multiple people, usually over the Internet. Keeping track of this content is a constant challenge for SPE but one that must be overcome. For even small pieces of content reaching unauthorized users can result in millions of dollars in terms of business loss, along with potential legal ramifications and brand dilution. In addition to protecting its intellectual property, SPE also needed to ensure that it was meeting corporate reporting policies as well as federal regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Corporate policies are set by Sony Headquarters in Japan, and are often time-consuming to implement without a centralized process.
To secure the distribution of valuable content across public networks, SPE needed to control both access and editing rights for staff and external stakeholders. The company also wanted to be able to dictate that only people with specified jobs could access different pieces of content, and ensure that users were correctly identified, authorized and authenticated before any content was made available to them.
To achieve this, SPE needed a central repository of information about all users, which could integrate with existing business systems.
Inability to fully and centrally manage the SPE user base had already resulted in significant operational cost increases and staff dissatisfaction — especially on user account access management and password reset.
To overcome this, SPE has deployed a single global identity and access management (IAM) solution from CA.
At the heart of the solution, which is based on CA SiteMinder® and CA Identity Manager, is a repository of information about more than 3,000 SPE employees, partners and contractors, together with information about what content they can access.
This information can be integrated with any of SPE’s third-party web solutions, meaning that a single, centrally managed repository can provide access rights information for any number of applications.
This enables SPE to gain the maximum possible benefit from its investment in third-party software products, by linking directly into applications, rather than developing custom links. As Heidi Kujawa, Director of Enterprise Applications at SPE, explains, “Not only did CA SiteMinder and Identity Manager have the industry recognition and market leadership we wanted, it is also an open and integrated solution that works seamlessly with third-party products.”
As employees and content change, managers now only need to update access information once — in the central repository — and the new permissions are reflected across the SPE infrastructure.
This centralized approach means that access to SPE’s valuable digital content is now managed through a single set of policies and access rights. All users are subject to the same authentication checks, regardless of what content they access, or what application they are using.
As a result, SPE has been able to:
- Drastically reduce management costs
- Simplify core business processes
- Ensure continuous compliance with regulatory and security policies set by head office
Having a single solution to control identity management is highly efficient, and SPE is able to add, on average, three new applications into the IAM service every six weeks, ensuring that the business reaps the benefits of the CA solution as widely as possible.
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