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 This US-based Fortune 500 Financial Services provider offers their customers and

members annuities, banking, insurance, mutual funds, IRAs as well as other

investments and financial planning services.

With more than 2.5 million customers and 2,500 financial representatives, one of the

key systems that had enabled them to grow their asset base is their Customer

Relationship Management (CRM) application. Initially a homegrown system, they

quickly realized that while managing customers was core to their business, creating,

updating and managing CRM software was not. As an alternative, they turned to

Salesforce.com, which provided the right mix of functionality, cost and accessibility

they required for their distributed organization. The only drawback was that the

system would no longer be on-premise, raising questions around security, integration

and compliance.

The Business Challenge

Financial Services industry regulations are strict with regard to exposing customer data publicly. But

Salesforce.com essentially builds and offers its CRM system on a shared infrastructure, meaning that multiple

customers’ data and application resources are hosted on the same computing resources. Moreover, anyone with a

credit card can sign up for the service and be granted access to those same resources almost immediately. While

Salesforce.com does provide assurances around data privacy and security, our Financial Services provider was

unwilling to let sensitive financial information leave their enterprise, raising issues around integration.

One of the key areas of contention with CRM centers on adoption. CRM rarely fails to be successfully

implemented, but it can fail if salespeople continue to manage accounts in their old, familiar ways rather than

taking advantage of the new system. For this reason, our Financial Services provider wanted to retain the core of 

their homegrown CRM system, which was based around Lotus Notes. Salespeople were already comfortable with

scheduling meetings, entering their contact information and generally organizing their day around their desktop

implementation of Lotus Notes’ calendar. Forcing them to move wholesale to Salesforce.com would likely prove

counterproductive. Again, issues arise around integration.

Finally, in order to better ensure sensitive information remains confidential, the security group at the Financial

Services provider has adopted a strict policy of not allowing passwords to leave the organization. This meant that

user and machine ids/passwords could not be populated in an external directory, but rather that Salesforce.com

would have to call back into the enterprise’s existing identity and access management infrastructure in order to

perform authentication and authorization.

Enter Layer 7

The Financial Services provider had adopted Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) at an early date. Consequently,when they went looking for a solution to their problems, they began their search with the traditional SOA vendors.

Layer 7 was the only vendor that could help them address all of their business and technical requirements in a

cost-effective manner.

The Layer 7 CloudSpan Gateway provided them with a way to safely consume Software as a Service (SaaS)

applications like Salesforce.com, delivering not only the end-to-end security they required for their integration

solution, but also the monitoring, logging and auditing capabilities they would need to ensure – and prove –

By the Numbers

•  >2.5 million customers

•  >$65B US in managed assets

•  >$150B in life insurance

•  >2,500 financial

representatives

•  >3,000 corporate employees

Fortune 500 Financial Services Provider  

Creating integration and SSO for Salesforce.com with CloudSpan

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Financial Services Provider Case Study 

Copyright © 2011 Layer 7 Technolog

trademarks of Layer 7 Technologies I

compliance with industry regulations. I

enterprise Identity and Access Manage

The Solution

When an employee or application atte

from SFDC to the CloudSpan Gateway (

1.  The CSG extracts the “user id”

2.  The CSG accesses the enterpri

3.  The CSG updates the message

4.  The CSG calls out to the enter

5.  The CSG sends a “true” or “fal

Salesforce.com completing th

In this way, the Financial Services Provi

calendar, as well as their mainframe-b

the enterprise.

The Results 

By ensuring that key functionality and

Financial Services provider’s account m

sure their backend system of record is

Web and Web services single sign-on t

all systems, improving adoption rates.

userids/passwords, lowering maintena

ies Inc. All rights reserved. SecureSpan and the Layer 7 Technologies d

nc. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respe

n addition, the ability to mediate between Salesforce.co

ment (IAM) infrastructure was key to solving the passw

mpts to log onto Salesforce.com, a delegated authentica

CSG) deployed on premise:

from the Salesforce.com request

se’s directory to get the password associated with the “

to contain both “user id” and password elements

prises’ IAM system to authenticate/authorize the user

se” response (based on whether IAM system permitted/

e login

der was able to bi-directionally synchronize each users’

sed customer data with Salesforce.com, while ensuring

customer data could be retained/accessible from the ne

anagers were able to smoothly transition to Salesforce.

always up to date. By extending their existing IAM syste

o Salesforce.com, users now need manage only a single l

Finally, administrators now have a single place to revoke

nce and administration costs.

sign mark are

ctive owners. 2 

m and their existing

rd security issue.

tion request is sent

ser id”

denied access) to

otus Notes

no passwords left

CRM system, the

om, while making

to provide both

ogin/password for

all