Fidelity Life is New Zealand’s largest locally owned and operated life insurer and three-time Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF) New Zealand Life Insurance Company of the Year. In FY20 Fidelity launched a Winning Aspiration, a bold five-year transformation strategy which reimagines what life insurance can be for New Zealanders. Underpinned by a $25m investment in a new technology platform, it’s all about delivering sustainable growth, building trust and continuing to deliver on their promise of protecting New Zealanders’ way of life.

Project Watson is named for the innovative spirit of Fidelity’s founders, Gordon and Shirley Watson, and will deliver the new technology platform that enables an entire transformation. Once completed, this new platform will drive innovation, productivity, resilience and improved support for Fidelity’s advisers and partners. Most importantly, though, it will allow Fidelity to develop simpler, more flexible products and continue delivering good outcomes for its customers.

Customers are at the heart of Fidelity Life and their wellbeing has remained the single-minded focus, even as the company adapted to the challenges of operating under COVID-19 restrictions. The earlier investment made in cloud technology meant the entire company was able to seamlessly transition to working from home during the COVID-19 lockdown periods, with minimal disruption to customers and advisers.

Coupled with the expansion of New Zealand’s data privacy laws, remote working during COVID-19 also meant information security and privacy became top priorities for the businesses.

This led to the growing realisation that enterprise information protection and management solutions are must-have tools for data protection and regulatory compliance, especially when dealing with our customer data and information.

Joel Anderson

Head of Architecture and Security

Fidelity Life

At UNIFY, we endeavour to build a security ecosystem through trusted partnership with our customers and partners.

The first step was to identify the security goals and objectives within Fidelity Life and then develop an integrated priorities and dependencies roadmap.

Protection controls were implemented, across both on-premise and Cloud, to reduce the risk of an inadvertent data breach, while achieving a balance between usability and security.

Once completed, Fidelity Life was onboarded to UNIFYSecure, which is a comprehensive managed security service offering that delivers managed detection and response services.

Tomasz Zukowski

Security Practice Lead

UNIFY Solutions NZ

Fidelity Life completed a Microsoft Security Workshop in the last quarter of 2019. The business impact findings identified the following requirements:

• Strategic Uplift of cybersecurity capabilities
• Information classification & labelling
• Migration of legacy core business applications
• Move towards a paperless organisation
• Operational regulatory compliance
• SSO/Password less capabilities
• ISO27001/PCIDSS compliance
• Modern workplace drive
• Business intelligence & analytics
• Infrastructure Security for Migration to the cloud

Fidelity Life chose to work with UNIFY Solutions, an expert Microsoft identity access and security partner. UNIFY Solutions has a comprehensive Managed Security Service Offering and is a Security Operations Centre (SOC) provider using Microsoft Azure Sentinel.

UNIFY consider it a privilege to be working with such an innovative New Zealand company as Fidelity Life as they modernise their security to ensure the customers privacy and management of personal information is protected.

Andrew Mabey

Business Development Executive, New Zealand

UNIFY Solutions New Zealand

As part of the deployment, the security strategy was grouped by service category which were then assigned capabilities:

• Data Classification, Labelling & Information Protection
• Data Loss Prevention
• Threat Detection & Protection
• User Education & Awareness
• Security Information and Event Monitoring

Choosing an expert partner is beneficial to Fidelity Life as we have limited internal security expertise.

Joel Anderson

Head of Architecture and Security

Fidelity Life

The advanced security reporting and alerting has seen the service provide a blend of proactive and reactive elements necessary for managing the security posture of the organisation. It also includes Trust Advisory from a strategy and planning perspective to mitigate risks against the shift in threats alongside the ever-evolving business landscape.

Working with UNIFY we see timely response - with constant monitoring through UNIFYSecure, a managed security service provision.

Joel Anderson

Head of Architecture and Security

Fidelity Life

The Managed Service simplifies Investigations. In the event of a critical incident, having the capabilities of UNIFYSecure on hand speeds up analysis and not only helps prevent threats but also thoroughly investigate incidents.

We take protection of our customers’ data and privacy seriously. They can feel secure knowing we’re providing round the clock continuous protection. Leveraging UNIFY’s dedicated team of specialists, we get the benefit of their knowledge base and experience, allowing threats to be identified before they become critical events.

Joel Anderson

Head of Architecture and Security

Fidelity Life

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