TRUE_IDENTITY Enterprise Identity Matching is a solution designed to fully match all legacy enterprise login credentials to a person or system. This is critical to ensuring privacy, security, and audit-ability of all network attached systems. It is also a mandatory step for any organization moving legacy data into an identity management system.
- Fully matching all login credentials - no garbage data remains
- No ‘fuzzy’ matches which will contain errors
- Using proven purpose-designed techniques and software tools
- Available as a cost and time effective services solution - no software to buy
The Business Problem
Detailed analysis of real world enterprise systems has shown that usually over 20% of all login credentials cannot be matched to a person. (contact us for details) Commonly a significant percentage of these active, unmatched, login accounts belong to people who should not have them including: ex-employees; people with incompatible roles and excess rights; and even dead people.
These user login credentials used by enterprise applications are the data foundation for the security, privacy, audit, and user-preference needs of an enterprise. They are the keys for access to the most important systems of the organization. As these systems become attached to the Internet, the quality of these data records becomes critical.
Because of this bad data in the system, organizations are carrying significant risks:
- Business Risk including theft of business critical information and susceptibility to malicious acts
- Reputational Risk from privacy violations and loss of customer confidence in your system integrity
- Financial Risk from undetected illegal transactions and lawsuits that may arise from customer identity theft
- Regulatory Risk. Unmatched credentials are the #1 source of Access Control Findings in audits and are observed be a barrier to SOX and other compliance regulations
Solution Alternatives
As organizations move to fix this problem, they look at a number of alternatives for action including:
- Maintaining the status quo. Most organizations are ignoring the problem, so as long as ‘everyone’ is in the same boat, why not wait longer?
Disadvantages:- SOX and other compliance deadlines are demanding action now
- There is a high risk being carried now
- This ignores the hidden costs born by internal projects that have to correct bad data
- Deleting Unmatched Credentials. Why not use a simple matching process and just delete any remaining unmatched credentials?
Disadvantages:- Some of the unmatched credentials will belong to critical business processes, so cannot be turned off
- Would generate a flood of help desk calls from active users
- Would destroy evidence of past improper use.
- Ad Hoc Solution. Organizations have database expertise that they can deploy quickly often using existing budgets to do this matching.
Disadvantages:- This reinventing of the wheel looks easy at first but soon grows beyond the capabilities of the first time team
- Costs and time escalations usually ends in an incomplete job.
- No tools and techniques to deal with the 20% seemingly unmatchable records.
- Weak auditability
- Work with your Identity/Audit Vendor’s Tools. Organizations may have an existing audit or identity vendor which has tools for matching and managing records. Why not use them?
Disadvantages:- Identity and Audit vendors do not deal with hard to match credentials. They assume you will manually clean these up. WIth large organizations this might exceed 5 man years.
- Many systems will not be attached to the new tools for quite some time, if ever. You need to deal with the risks in those systems too.
The Solution: True_Identity Enterprise Identity Matching
The TRUE_IDENTITY Solution is purpose built for this problem:
- Leverages best in class data quality and matching tools developed over 2 decades
- Provides unique ‘adjudication’ and ‘forensic matching’ tools specifically designed to address your ‘unmatchable’ records.
- Provides clean data necessary for reports you can trust
- We provide resources as a service engagement leaving your team free to deal with your main business projects
- Easily customized to your specific needs significantly reducing solution cost and timeframe.
Business Benefits
- Significantly reduce business risks now
- Reduce significant source of Audit Deficiencies
- You will complete a mandatory step for upcoming identity and audit projects
- Legacy, unmatched data is a source of forensic information
- Possibly catch improper activity
- Discover flawed business processes
For more information, contact: Philip Hume, Identity & Matching Solutions, The Kenna Group. 905-361-4044.
