Identity Assurance Comes of Age for Government, Business, and Consumer Security

ActivIdentity

Identity Assurance Comes of Age for Government, Business, and Consumer Security

The ability to securely and confidently establish the identity of an individual or organization is critical to national security programs, commercial businesses, and individual citizens all over the world. IDC believes that a number of convergent factors will enable governments and businesses to adopt a strong identity assurance stance. Some of the key factors are highlighted in the following list.

• The current financial crisis has increased the transaction volume significantly, resulting in a rise of identity fraud, theft, and compromise in both government and corporate institutions worldwide.
• Demand for advanced authentication solutions is rising in tandem with regulations designed to protect providers from fraud, data misuse, and identity theft. Passwords alone do not provide adequate protection.
• Demand for advanced authentication solutions is rising in conjunction with the number of people being laid off. Disgruntled former employees represent a major risk factor, and thus a more sophisticated approach to the life-cycle management of identity credentials is required.
• The current financial crisis is viewed by many as self-inflicted, and therefore, the public is calling for tighter government oversight and regulations. Advanced authentication solutions can offer a natural pathway to compliance because they enable organizations to track and report who was accessing what and at what time.
• Until recently, there was no common infrastructure to address identity assurance needs that could be implemented across a variety of industry and government segments. This requires a centralized, core technology and underlying subsystems to create a high level of trust to operate electronically.
• The need for organizations to support multiple authentication methods is increasing demand for open and flexible authentication infrastructures.

A proven identity assurance platform is critical to secure, successful transactions across Government-to-Citizen (G2C), Employer-to-Employee (E2E), and Business-to-Customer (B2C) scenarios.