RSAC: Verizon Announces Identity Service

During an early-morning press briefing at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Verizon unveiled a new enterprise identity service that the company promised would "dramatically improve the way companies authenticate the identities of employees, partners, and customers." Verizon Vice President of Security and Industry Solutions Dr. Peter Tippett said that this suite of cloud-based services would help drive down the cost of enterprise authentication, security, and identity efforts.

"For the most part, we have found that authentication methods used by enterprises today are either inadequate or difficult and expensive,” Tippett said. "Until now, there’s been no single service that delivers a total-solution offering that includes the critical features -- such as registering users, providing identity proofing and issuing identity credentials -- required to truly meet the needs of today’s enterprise."

According to Tippett, this new service will provide risk-based transactional authentication, credential provisioning (including support for multiple authentication types such as hardware/software tokens, mobile devices, geo-location mapping, etc.), and identity registration. Tippett also announced the creation of a Identity Advisory Board that would incorporate input from enterprise users of the service intto updates and revisions of the product.

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