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Press Release OSM books £297,000 (US$535,000) order from Lloyds TSB for its COSuser user provisioning software ASCOT, UK and SEATTLE, WA, USA. September 14th, 2004: UK software house, Open Systems Management Ltd. ("OSM") today announced an order for its COSuser user provisioning software from Lloyds TSB Bank plc ("Lloyds TSB"), one of Britain's largest clearing banks. The software will provide Lloyds TSB with even greater control over its identity information and add to internal security over system access rights. It will be used to control employee registration and de-registration across the UNIX infrastructure so that only those users who need to have access to a particular system will get that access. The software will initially be deployed at the bank's headquarters in London on 230 systems running IBM AIX and Sun Microsystems Solaris. Lloyds TSB will also use the COSuser software to reduce the number of users who need privileged access to manage its UNIX infrastructure. Bob Spencer, Head of Group IT Security and Risk at the bank said: "The bank has a continuing programme to secure its computing infrastructure. We looked at a number of vendors who could provide either user provisioning software or privileged user management. The bank needed to meet legislative requirements and ensure that best practice for access security was being implemented. In COSuser we found a product that could perform both user provisioning and privileged user management." UNIX systems have two levels of native access, a normal user and a 'root' user, or 'superuser' as it is called. The number of people needing superuser access is dramatically reduced when COSuser is deployed which improves the security of systems. COSuser incorporates an operations workflow tool that allows complex UNIX administration routines, that would normally require superuser access, to be delegated to operations staff to carry out in a controlled, audited basis without the individual having to inherit privileged access rights. Superuser access can still be granted in a restricted form to selected individuals, in the event that these access rights are a necessity. In this event, the software makes sure that all actions carried out as superuser are audited, with the audit trails held on a secure audit server. Pattern matching can be run against the audit trails to detect keystroke combinations that might cause concern from a security aspect. OSM believes that the recent spate of legislation including Sarbanes Oxley in the USA, Basel II and the European Union Data Protection Directive will lead more and more publicly listed companies to get their identity management in order. Much of the legislation revolves around boards of public companies ensuring the integrity of the data that they disclose to shareholders. Mark Nicolett, an analyst at Gartner said: "An aspect of demonstrating integrity is the presence of user, system and application resource-access controls, as well as processes to monitor and correct lapses in these controls." COSuser provides centralised user administration, password synchronisation, and web browser based workflow for heterogeneous networks of distributed systems. OSM's CEO, Neil Chaney, said: "Lloyds TSB runs a very tight ship from a security perspective. COSuser is the leading user provisioning software for UNIX and Linux infrastructures and we are pleased Lloyds TSB has chosen to use OSM for privileged access control." Sales of identity management systems will grow to $4.6 billion by 2007, nearly doubling the $2.4 billion in revenue they generated in 2002, according to IDC. About OSM Open Systems Management (OSM) — a UK company, founded in 1988 and based out of Ascot, UK; Seattle, WA, USA; Baltimore, MD, USA; and Perth, Australia — develops and markets COSuser, a leading user provisioning solution. COSuser incorporates nine years of real-world experience of providing mid- to large-scale enterprises with centralized user management software for networks of UNIX, Linux, Microsoft Windows and other operating systems. OSM works with technology partners to provide an integrated, end-to-end solution that allows its customers to manage the identity lifecycle of their IT users. OSM is backed by 3i, Europe's largest venture capital investment company. Notable customers include West Interactive Corp., Duke Energy, Iams, Lloyds TSB Bank, Vodafone and Northumbrian Water. Web addresses: http://www.cosuser.com and http://www.osmcorp.com. For further information, please contact: Neil Chaney
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