BT Group plc is the holding company for an integrated group of businesses providing voice and data services in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. British Telecommunications plc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group, holds virtually all businesses and assets of the BT group, principally of three lines of business:

• BT Retail, serving businesses and residential customers and including BT Openworld, one of the UK’s leading ISPs.
• BT Wholesale, providing network services and solutions within the UK, including ADSL, conveyance, transit, bulk delivery of private circuits, frame relay and ISDN connections.
• BT Global Services, BT’s managed services and solutions provider, serving multi-site organizations worldwide. Its core target market is the top 10,000 global multi-site organizations with European operations.

BT is also one of Europe’s largest users of Novell’s NetWare® operating system and NDS®/eDirectory™ software. BT also has a significant deployment of Microsoft* Windows NT* and Windows* 2000 servers as well as other proprietary mainframe and mid range systems. The organization employs in excess of 100,000 people and within the Novell environment they have a similar number of user accounts.

During 2001, BT’s internal audit determined that further measures were needed in order to meet the demands of their security policy. This is an ongoing process of review to ensure the organization is continually vigilant to possible threats and risks as their internal systems, procedures and operations change in line with the global business climate. The rapid deployment of network access throughout the vast organizational structure meant that the need to be able to account for users’ activity across the enterprise was becoming more important. With a complex and varied network infrastructure, it was inevitable that there would be many users who had administrator rights, access to server consoles and, potentially, access to sensitive and confidential data. Auditing user activity is not necessarily viewed as a way to catch culprits, what it does ensure is that cases of human error and other incidents can be identified with appropriate action taken promptly. BT identified a number of requirements with both audit, technical and operational considerations in mind; it was not possible to address these by standard operating system functionality within the Novell or Microsoft platforms:

Audit requirements

At the conclusion of their evaluation, BT procured an enterprise license for the LT Auditor+ software. In addition to addressing BT’s broad functional specification, there were a number of key issues that helped make LT Auditor+ the chosen solution. Firstly, the centralized configuration and reporting capability which would aid a speedy deployment and minimize ongoing maintenance and management resource. This subsequently proved to be a key benefit as BT completed their initial deployment of LT Auditor+ three months ahead of their deadline. Another key issue was scalability – during test, this had also been more than satisfactory and the live roll-out confirmed that LT Auditor+ was indeed highly scalable with the first stage of implementation covering approximately 350 servers.

Another major consideration for BT was the issue of supplier and distributor relationships. BT’s policy is to "buy into" a company’s product based on current technology but they also place great importance on the stability of the supplier, the service and responsiveness as well as the future development plans for the product. Working closely with both Blue Lance and Altman Technologies, BT were able to satisfy themselves that both suppliers met these requirements. Both Blue Lance and Altman Technologies have been in business since the late 1980s and serve an extensive list of clients in the corporate, government, financial and public sectors.

Since the initial roll-out of LT Auditor+ on the NetWare platform, BT has commenced the deployment of LT Auditor+ within their Active Directory* environment that supports some 100,000 users in authenticating to Microsoft services. LT Auditor+ is also being deployed within three new large NetWare 6 environments including the LDAP directory supporting the authentication and authorization of Web services.

"LT Auditor+ enabled us to address the requirements of our internal auditors and consequently comply with our corporate security policy," says Hopkins. "Key issues were scalability and ease of deployment and we were very happy on both counts with the LT Auditor+ solution. A significant benefit provided by LT Auditor+ was the centralized management, configuration and reporting capabilities which enabled us to complete our initial roll-out to 350 servers in just two months, some three months ahead of the auditors’ deadline. During the initial evaluation stages, Blue Lance proved very reactive in producing product enhancements to fulfill specific audit requirements that BT had."

* LT Auditor+ is a trademark of Blue Lance, Inc. Active Directory, Microsoft, Windows and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.