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Chevron
Founded in 1879, Chevron is a worldwide petroleum
and chemical company headquartered in San Francisco, California.
The fifth-largest oil company in the world, with operations in nearly
100 countries, Chevron supports a distributed network of over 40,000
users worldwide. Effectively managing and maintaining this network
environment is a business-critical issue for Chevron.
Chevron's recent move to the Windows NT Server network operating
platform provided some distinct advantages and offered Chevron the
opportunity to leverage exciting new technologies. However, it also
presented a challenge to Chevron network administrators. Accustomed
to the granular, flexible control of Novell NetWare and Unix networking;
the Chevron administrators were frustrated by the "all or nothing"
user access privilege levels of Windows NT Server. Network administrators
could no longer grant limited administration rights to users, making
NT a much less flexible platform, threatening security and limiting
overall network scalability. Procedures as simple as changing a
user login password now required authority at the domain level.
The upshot of this was a growing list of approximately 120 users
with domain administration privileges. This was not only impractical,
but also severely compromised Chevron's network security.
"In the past, Chevron's business units had control over their own
user ids. Moving to an enterprise network solution meant that we
either had to centralize control of user ids or we had to give every
business unit access to every user id in the enterprise. Neither
approach was very attractive," said James Weider, Network Software
Engineer.
Chevron decided that only a distributed administration model that
offered more granular levels of control would meet their scalability
needs and around the clock support requirements. To extend the capabilities
of Windows NT Server and ease the user administration burden, Chevron
turned to Trusted Enterprise Manager (TEM) from Master Design &
Development (Avatier.).
"We deployed TEM to allow us to grant granular levels of authority.
Every group can now control their own user ids without worrying
about other groups having access," continued Weider. "Running NT's
User Manager over WAN links was unbearably slow. With 10,000 users,
it would take an administrator several minutes to open User Manager
and several minutes for screen refreshes after each change. TEM
only displays the groups under the administrator's control, so start
and refresh time is seconds rather than minutes."
Chevron is currently using Trusted Enterprise Manager 2.05 on Windows
NT 4.0 servers, supporting both Windows NT and Windows 9x clients
over TCP/IP.
TEM offered Chevron the convenience and flexibility of distributed
user administration on a massive scale - reducing domain administrators
from approximately 120 to under 10 - allowing the network to mirror
the corporate business structure without jeopardizing overall network
security.
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