Restricting Portfolio Access with security.manager
Assignment
In 2015, Wintershall introduced GeoX software from Schlumberger Information Systems, to assess the risks and volumes of potential petroleum and natural gas deposits worldwide and hence to manage the portfolio more efficiently. The software is available to employees all over the world through a Citrix environment that is managed centrally at the company’s headquarters in Kassel.
Initially, all relevant analyses from the previous eight years had to be transferred to the new system, thereby locating the relevant evaluation data spatially. In order to make the spatial information accessible to the user, it was important that the access rights to the geodata were mapped analogously to the authorizations in GeoX.
Without con terra’s security.manager – ArcGIS Edition, we would still keep the geodata in the closet and inaccessible. security.manager opens up complete new possibilities to offer GIS-based web services exactly for the users with different permissions and to control the access.
The users who already use the secured web services have many new ideas. We look forward to further implementations.
Eugen Gass, Wintershall Holding GmbH
The Customer
Wintershall is Germany‘s largest international oil and natural gas producer. With around 2,000 employees from over 50 nations, for over 85 years they have been exploring for and promoting oil and natural gas in Europe, North Africa, South America, Russia and the Middle East region.
As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the chemicals group BASF, Ludwigshafen, Wintershall bases their success on their technical know-how and strong international partnerships.
Solution
In a pilot application using security.manager, the current inventory of Wintershall’s leads and prospects, in connection with the petroleum and natural gas licensing areas, was displayed geographically. In addition, infrastructure layers of a third-party provider were integrated (pipelines, platforms, etc.) along with geological structures used by Wintershall. Thus, only one map has to be maintained, and depending on the access role of the user, only the section for which they have authorization is displayed.
The solution is based on
ArcGIS Server
Portal for ArcGIS
security.manager – ArcGIS Edition
Web Application Builder
ArcSDE, Oracle
Python
Usage
Compared to the tabular representation, the user has now additional access and evaluation possibilities, since the prospect is connected spatially to the licensing areas and the infrastructure. Additional functionalities such as measure, print and search offer further convenience for the user.
The effort required for the necessary provision of a large number of individual views had made a map-oriented visualization for the Wintershall prospect information not seem economical. However, introducing security.manager has eliminated the need for the parallel operation of redundant services. The efforts are reduced to the simple maintenance of different rights in a single service, through which the individual access can take place in a secure way.
Summary
Wintershall uses con terra’s security.manager – ArcGIS Edition to provide users around the world with safe and controlled access to the GIS data provided by headquarters.
The first service created includes Wintershall prospecting in its own licenses and was linked with specially created views from GeoX. This allows users to view data from the GeoX database in spatial relation for the first time rather than in a limited tabular form.
The solution is based on Esri’s core technology. In combination with security.manager, it is possible to create a single map service instead of operating individual services for each of the existing GeoX roles. This dramatically reduces administrative overhead.
Further applications are being prepared due to the positive user response.
Rüdiger Gartmann