Network World recently had an interesting story on how Chevron is moving to an enterprise-wide smart-card based security system as they bring on the last 50,000 users into their two-factor authenticated network password system.

The article is by John Fontana, and was published on Oct. 31, 2005.

This system supports 200 countries and 1800 offices worldwide, and is called "Chevron SmartBadge" which enables both building and network access with desktop logon and single sign-on to over 3000 applications.

This effort started nearly four years ago with the first year devoted to defining governance and policy standards before actually implementations started via a pilot program.  Obviously, the pilot program matured into an actual implementation and this last part is called Phase 3. The effort is spearheaded by integrator Schlumberger and Chevron’s Information Technology Company.

Before the system, Chevron had 4000 password resets on average a month, now they have 70% less.  Exact details on corporate wide ROI was not released by Chevron for the article, but they did say they received positive ROI almost immediately.  The article did note that the end-user hardware/software cost to enable the system was in the $50 per user area, but the costs associated with the back-end were not made available.

Other technologies mentioned in the article:

• Microsoft Active Directory
• Schlumberger Identity Process Security Platform
• Passlogix v-Go

GotoMeeting & TechPocasts.com event for November 2005 being planned.