Strong Authentication for the Enterprise: Entrust IdentityGuard

Strong Versatile Authentication for the Enterprise

When an employee or partner accesses a corporate network through an extranet, remote access gateway (VPN) or Microsoft® Windows® desktop, they have effectively opened a door to the organization's most sensitive assets, intellectual property and customer data. The security of the network and desktops are only as strong as the authentication method implemented, highlighting the importance of executing this properly.

Coupled with industry mandates like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) or the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standard, a requirement for protecting sensitive card holder data, organizations are being driven to increase the strength of authentication across a much broader user population than ever before.

The most common way of authenticating employees and partners — username and password — is also one of the weakest in use today, and has been subject to numerous forms of proven password attacks. Strengthening this type of authentication — typically by mandating long, complex passwords and enforcing frequent changes — often delivers minimal security improvement, yet significantly increases help-desk costs.

As part of a layered security model, Entrust IdentityGuard is a strong, open versatile authentication platform that enables you to layer security across diverse users, transactions and applications — based on the associated risk. It is a common-sense approach to strong authentication that enables you to apply the right level of strong authentication tailored to the assessed risk for the transaction that the user is performing. The strong authentication platform integrates with your existing environment and minimizes the impact of security on employees, customers and partners.

Strong Authentication that Costs Less
The Entrust IdentityGuard versatile authentication platform provides one of the widest ranges of open authentication capabilities on the market today. Entrust IdentityGuard provides a choice of strong authenticators that meet your requirements related to the use of client-side software, hardware or changes to the user experience.

User authentication capabilities include IP-geolocation, device authentication, knowledge-based, out-of-band OTP (via SMS or voice), grid-based, display card and OTP hardware tokens like the Entrust IdentityGuard Mini and Pocket tokens.

Learn more about Entrust IdentityGuard strong user authentication methods

Entrust IdentityGuard delivers mutual authentication — also called two-way authentication — in addition to strong user authentication. Provide confidence to users (e.g., employees, partners and customers) that they are accessing your legitimate Web site or responding to an authentic email message.

Learn more about Entrust IdentityGuard mutual authentication methods.

As a single point of authentication, Entrust IdentityGuard supports username-and-password authentication, which enables organizations to manage all types of authentication through a single, proven security infrastructure.

Flexible
With competing security solutions, organizations have been forced to choose a single authentication method for users from a limited choice of options. This inflexibility forced undesirable trade-offs between security, cost and usability. By offering a choice of authentication capabilities, Entrust IdentityGuard helps organizations tailor security across a wide range of users, transactions and applications. This enables organizations to apply strong authentication based on user needs and corporate requirements.

Risk-based Authentication
Entrust IdentityGuard provides organizations the capability to determine and enforce different levels of authentication based on the amount of assumed risk. The ability to implement risk-based authentication allows organizations to minimize user impact while applying strong authentication to protect against attacks that lead to unauthorized access and identity theft.

There are many reasons why it makes sense to layer strong authentication across your organization:

  • Stronger security for transactions with greater risk
  • Minimize the impact of security on the user experience by requiring stronger authentication only when required to reduce the risk of fraud
  • Reduce cost by deploying a mix of authenticators based on risk, user requirements and authenticator cost, managed under one central strong authentication platform
  • Apply strong authentication across the many different channels over which you communicate with your employees, partners and customers
  • Meet increasing governance pressure to better protect user identities without mandating a one-size-fits-all approach

Strong Authentication for Remote Access
The Entrust IdentityGuard versatile authentication platform works seamlessly with leading remote access vendors and is designed to integrate with little impact to the existing infrastructure. It does not require additional client or server software for VPN remote access, interoperating with various VPN vendors including Cisco, Check Point, Nortel, Juniper Networks and more.

The solution can also add additional authentication to leading Web access control solutions including IBM Tivoli Access Manager, CA SiteMinder and Citrix Presentation Server. The solution even offers native 802.1x support for wireless access point security.

Multichannel Authentication
Entrust IdentityGuard is designed to support other channels including telephone, email, SMS text message, kiosk and in-person transactions. Authentication methods can be performed via keypads and do not require complex user interfaces. For example, grid authentication can be easily used to support automated call center authentication of users by prompting for a grid location challenge and having the user enter the response via the telephone touch-tone pad. By providing this extensibility, organizations can leverage their initial Entrust IdentityGuard investment across multiple channels.

Learn more about Entrust IdentityGuard strong authentication methods:

Download the whitepaper "Enterprise Authentication: Increasing Security Coverage Without Breaking the Bank"

Entrust Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

Public key infrastructure or PKI refers to a comprehensive system that uses authentication security and encryption software to establish and maintain a trustworthy network. Government agencies and corporations use PKI certificates to fortify their IT infrastructure from unauthorized access.

Entrust PKI security solutions help network administrators accomplish the goal of greater security by associating a public key with authorized users to enable encryption and digital signature capabilities across network applications. Epassport PKI is an adaptation of PKI for the government sector that stores information on a chip that can be verified against the data on the passport. Entrust, a certification authority, also enables passport PKI and smart card PKI for an additional security.

Entrust is a trusted provider of network security solutions that include digital certificates, two factor-authentication, ssl certificates, token authentication, and certificate management systems.