Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess 8550 EN - Manual (Page 2)

2 Alcatel-Lucent | 8550 Web Services Gateway
Multiple systems in the financial industry — loan and mortgage applications,
risk reporting, offline batch processing, Internet banking, enterprise resource
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 difficult to integrate enterprise class authentication, authorization
and auditing into a group of disparate IT systems and still maintain
information security, corporate governance and regulatory compliance.
The leading 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 financial industry as a flexible modular
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.
However, like a double-edged sword, it is also a SOA’s greatest weakness,
because by default, an SOA has minimal authentication and authorization
mechanisms and lacks functions critical to financial institutions 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.
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 corporate
governance standards.