Building society goes platinum

Newcastle Building Society works with FAST to ensure software compliance

Newcastle Building Society has achieved the Platinum Award of the FAST Standard for Software Compliance, ensuring the organisation is in control of its IT assets and legally compliant.

It is one one of six financial services firms to achieve this target, following guidelines set out by industry standard BS7799. As part of this, it used FAST Corporate Services to help manage its IT assets and legal obligations.

Pat Watson, information security manager at Newcastle Building Society, said: 'One of the fastest areas of growth in our business is the provision of services, such as the development and management of Internet accounts, for other financial service providers. As such, it is important for us to be able to demonstrate the highest standards of IT compliance and efficiency to third-party companies looking to establish partnerships with Newcastle Building Society.'

Newcastle worked with FAST to help it understand and achieve software compliance. The size of the company and the large number of individual sites meant that full IT compliance was a long term operation.

'With 177 servers and 1,133 PCs across 53 sites, it was agreed that a software auditing tool was required', said Watson. 'This greatly assisted the audit process which would otherwise have been a huge task. The software quickly provided us with the information we needed to start reconciling all the software applications against the licences held by the company.'

'Before purchasing new software, we are now able to refer to the new system and check whether spare licences are already available," said Watson.'As a business we rely heavily on technology, so this has also helped us become far more efficient and make savings on our IT costs.'

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