The Challenge
New Zealand Post Group (NZPG) is made up of a range of businesses that offer a variety of solutions, including banking and digital offerings. Kiwibank was launched in 2002 as part of the group, and sent up PostShop stores across New Zealand. This broad group then entered into a long-term partnership with the Crown to enhance and expand existing igovt services into the private sector. The goal was to drive uptake and increase the return on investment.
The Solution
With the passing of the Electronic Identity Verification Act in 2012, bringing the all-of-government igovt logon and identity verification services to the private sector became a possibility.
A public private partnership was established between the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and NZPG to bring these services to the market. This included rebranding them to RealMe® service.
Datacom’s unique Identity and Access Management expertise, coupled with our seven years of igovt responsibilities, ensured we would be the best partner for this project, which aimed to open the market for consumption of igovt services by private sector organisations.
The basis of the RealMe solution was to re-use a set of igovt services owned by DIA, which provide authentication and identity verification services for the public sector. The solution extends the current igovt services while meeting the strictest requirements of brand, usability, privacy protection, and information security.
The RealMe service consolidated the existing igovt logon service and the new RealMe application. The login service infrastructure is hosted on our Government Infrastructure as a Service (GIaaS) platform, which provides the elasticity, longevity, security and high-availability requirements of the solution.
The verification service relies on explicit consent from customers before sharing information, and enables customers to see when and to whom they have provided information online. The service offers a range of benefits to the customer including improved access to real-time information, higher levels of customer support services, and better communication between companies and their own customers.
The security of information and systems was fundamental to the design of the solution, which adheres to the New Zealand Information Security Manual.
“Datacom responded to the schedule and technical challenge with a high level of commitment which allowed us to not only meet the tight deadlines, but to also achieve a successful launch of RealMe.”
Mandy Smith - Head of Agency Services, New Zealand Post Group
Results
Our specialist Identity and Access Management team re-platformed the entire solution (including almost every component in the technology stack) and migrated over 1,000,000 user credentials from the old platform into the Government Infrastructure as a Service platform over launch weekend without a hitch.