Accenture [ACN], which is involved in a number of domestic and international security programs related to identity management and solutions, has introduced a new end-to-end identity solution that is aimed at “unlocking value across the enterprise” by establishing a trusted identity and then pushing it into various applications to increase security and cut costs, company officials tell TR2.
“We believe that additional value and incremental value can be unlocked from identity management investments if that enterprise solution view is taken as opposed to just focusing on meeting government mandates, or just focusing on the immediate threat,” says Paul Kolebuck, the company’s lead on the Accenture Smart Identity Solution (ASIS). “Think more in terms of how your procurement is structured, how are your investments being made, such that you are thinking about all of those challenges so…not only can you meet the government challenges and establish strong identity you can start to redefine your operating model to get all of the benefits of a strong identity.”
For example, Kolebuck says, some government agencies that are in the midst of meeting requirements under HSPD-12 for the most part are issuing expensive flash passes and little else. That’s just the front end of credentialing, establishing and verifying an identity, he says.
Other agencies, however, are being more “forward thinking about how this is going to go in the logical and physical environment,” Kolebuck says.
Based on its experience with the United Kingdom’s trusted airline traveler pilot program called miSense, Accenture decided just over a year ago to develop ASIS. The company saw a “convergence of challenges” such as illegal immigration and related laws, government mandates, terrorism threats, identity theft and fraud, physical and logical security breaches, systems administration costs and complexity, and others facing potential government and commercial customers of identity management solutions.
Those challenges, led Accenture to cull through the various components that make up identity management solutions, such as technology, best practices and process flows, to create ASIS.
“ASIS is a convergence of all of the existing knowledge and though processes around the identity management process itself,” says Gayle Nix, executive director for Global Immigration, Justice and Public Safety at Accenture.
There are three main ways Accenture will target the federal government with ASIS. One is just helping the government think through its process models based on the company’s global experience, Nix says.
The company has built a business architecture for ASIS based on an extensive and detailed process model library developed over the past two years called the High Performance Process Excellence (HPPE) Identity Management Process Model. Based on inputs from Accenture’s global base of subject matter experts, the library contains detailed process flows for various operating functions within an enterprise and represents an “enterprise view of identity management processes,” according to the company briefing slide. The HPPE model is one of the important differentiators for ASIS, Nix says.
“This gives us the ability to very quickly, effectively and completely solution blueprint identity management capabilities and solutions for our clients,” Kolebuck says.
Secondly, ASIS can be provided as an “out-of-the-box” solution that is ready to meet 6- to 70 percent of a client’s requirement, Nix says.
Kolebuck notes that even as a largely ready to go solution ASIS is designed to work in a customer’s “native heterogeneous environment” and add only what is needed and also swap in various other vendors’ technologies. He says the solution has plenty of “configurability” so that as a “reference architecture our clients can utilize what meets their requirements and not necessarily leverage other pieces that they don’t need.”
Finally, ASIS is being offered as a managed service, allowing government customers to worry about managing their core functions, Nix says.
The technology Accenture can bring to bear under ASIS is commercial-off-the-shelf products. At its Smart Identity Center in Reston, Va., Accenture has set up a front-end credentialing demonstration to establish a trusted identity as part of the ASIS solution. The demonstration includes biographic and biometric capture, document authentication, database searching, card printing and issuance technologies from various Tier I vendors in the identity management space.
Accenture also offers its customers the option of searching commercial databases to improve the vetting of identities. Various government databases and watchlists are just one aspect of verifying an identity, Nix says. But with commercial data sources “we can bring back information…to say that all looks reasonable, or yellow, you may want to check,” she says.
“The commercial data allow you to increase your level of confidence that his person is who they say they are,” Kolebuck says.
Accenture is targeting more than just federal government customers with ASIS. The company is also demonstrating ASIS at its technology center in Sophia, France. “Our opportunities and our potential clients are global,” Nix says.
Nix says the company is seeing significant interest for ASIS from commercial customers, driven by such challenges as data security, immigration and healthcare laws. In addition, better technology and lower price points are helping to increase interest in identity management solutions from commercial customers, Kolebuck says.
At large organizations where employees have worked their way into positions where they have access to sensitive information, employers want to know that the individual they are hiring is who he or she says they are, Nix says.