Shell Canada Limited is a leading manufacturer, distributor and marketer of refined petroleum products. Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, they are major producers of natural gas, natural gas liquids and bitumen, and Canada's largest producer of sulfur.

 

The computing environment at Shell Canada is diverse and spread across the provinces. Over the last few years, they’ve transitioned from a complex mainframe environment to the J.D. Edwards Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution running on the IBM iSeries.

In the wake of the transition, demand among their more than 3,600 employees increased for access to corporate data through varied applications and platforms. They understood that their old, menu-based security scheme, which constrained users to predefined functions and screens, would be ineffective in preserving the integrity of the data when accessed using today's desktop tools.

 

Shell Canada knew that opening their system threatened the security of their data, but network access was a critical requirement. In the words of John Thiers, Staff Systems Analyst, "We were opening ourselves up to security breaches or even inadvertent destruction of data."