Western & Southern Financial Group Slashes Costs by Using Novell Identity Management Solutions

Novell today announced Western & Southern Financial Group, a Fortune 500 company, chose Novell® Access Governance Suite and Novell Identity Manager to automate and improve compliance processes. Using Novell technology, Western & Southern's IT staff reduced time spent on user provisioning by 80 percent and cut password-related help desk calls by 45 percent. By streamlining administrative processes, the IT staff can focus on more strategic projects, enabling the company to be more agile and responsive to customer needs.

As states adopt new insurance regulations, both public and private insurance companies have had to upgrade their compliance initiatives. Western & Southern must comply with the new Model Audit Rule (MAR) regulations sponsored by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), as well as several other regulatory requirements including HIPAA and Graham-Leach-Bliley.

Western & Southern is working with Deloitte on its enterprise roles management initiative to automate the company's compliance processes.

"The amount of time and energy required by companies to achieve compliance with a host of regulatory requirements is growing exponentially," said Lyle Carlson, Director at Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Establishing a roles-based infrastructure is a smart way for clients to simplify and automate much of their compliance management."

Instead of increasing staff to manage compliance reporting, monitoring and auditing, Western & Southern chose to automate many of its processes. The added flexibility from automation helps the company to maintain its superior reputation and rapid growth rate.

"Novell offers a cost-effective, integrated suite of products across the entire identity management spectrum," said Mark W. Pfefferman, assistant vice president and director, Identity & Access Management, Western & Southern Financial Group. "Novell has a good vision for what we are trying to accomplish, and we found that Novell Access Governance Suite fills an important niche in the market."

As the foundation of its identity management platform, Western & Southern uses Novell Identity Manager to automatically synchronize user identity information across multiple systems including Novell eDirectory™, Microsoft* Active Directory* and Microsoft Exchange. In the past, manual provisioning processes could often take up to a week. Now the IT team can provision new users with access to everything they need in less than a day.

The combination of Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Governance Suite helps Western & Southern map business roles to IT entitlements, allowing the company to provision access to systems and resources based on the user's role in the organization. The company can then certify to auditors that the appropriate roles and entitlements are in place according to internal policies and external regulations.

"While compliance management is complex and necessary, it doesn't have to be a costly burden in this rapidly changing economic environment," said Justin Steinman, Vice President of Solution and Product Marketing at Novell. "Using Novell solutions to automate provisioning processes and monitor user access rights is a cost effective way for Western & Southern to meet these goals."

About Western & Southern Financial Group
Western & Southern Financial Group (Western & Southern) is a Cincinnati-based diversified family of financial services companies with assets owned, managed and under our care in excess of $42 billion as of Dec. 31, 2008. A Fortune 500 company, Western & Southern has received A.M. Best's highest rating of A++ Superior for financial strength, Standard & Poor's AA+ rating (one of the nine highest-rated life insurance groups in the world) and is consistently recognized by Moody's and Fitch for financial strength and sound management. With a heritage dating to 1888, the group's affiliates include The Western and Southern Life Insurance Company; Western-Southern Life Assurance Company; Capital Analysts Incorporated;1, 2 Columbus Life Insurance Company; Eagle Realty Group, LLC; Fort Washington Investment Advisors, Inc.;1 Fort Washington Savings Company;3 IFS Financial Services, Inc.; Integrity Life Insurance Company; The Lafayette Life Insurance Company; National Integrity Life Insurance Company; Touchstone Advisors, Inc.;1 and Touchstone Securities, Inc.2 For more information, visit www.westernsouthern.com. Western & Southern is the title sponsor of the Western & Southern Financial Group Masters and Women's Open tennis tournaments.

1. A registered investment advisor.
2. A registered broker-dealer and member FINRA/SIPC.
3. Member FDIC.

Ratings refer to the financial strength of the insurance company and not to the safety, stability or performance of any investment product.

About Deloitte
As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte & Touche LLP, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Deloitte Services LP, subsidiaries of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries.