Generali Deutschland Informatik Services GmbH, the IT branch of Generali Deutschland, the second largest primary insurance group in the German market, required an affordable, easy-to-use authentication platform to secure access to a new Web portal for field agents and sales staff.
Citing streamlined deployment and a wide range of authentication choices, the organization selected Entrust, Inc., and the trusted security vendor's Entrust IdentityGuard versatile authentication platform.
"Our main goal was to move toward a strong second-factor authentication solution, but do so in a way that fit within our budget and was easy for our sales staff to use on a daily basis," said Arndt Bickhoff, GDIS management. "Entrust's solution is proven and we look forward to leveraging their expertise to help secure access to our corporate environments."
The company's goal was to move away from preconfigured hardware and IP-Sec VPN clients toward a Web-based portal approach. To secure this migration, user IDs and passwords were deemed insufficient to properly protect up to 100,000 user accounts. In the end, GDIS was won over by Entrust's grid card authenticator and its convenient form factor, straightforward use and cost-effective deployment.
"Adopting a policy that mandates strong authentication is one of the most important strategies a security-conscious organization can make," said Entrust President and CEO Bill Conner. "It's clear that Generali Deutschland Informatik Services has their customers' best interests in mind and they are taking the appropriate steps to ensure all are secure while also protecting the organization's brand."
Generali Deutschland Informatik Services will produce the custom-branded grid cards internally for the first 25,000 users, with deployment commencing in September 2009. The Entrust IdentityGuard implementation also includes integration with IBM Tivoli Access Manager (TAM) 6.1, WebSphere, Tivoli Directory and other enterprise applications.
Entrust's patented grid card is a unique, credit card-sized authenticator consisting of numbers and characters in a row-column format. Upon login, users are presented with a coordinate challenge and must respond with the information in the corresponding cells from the unique grid card they possess. Organizations are able to deploy grids both physically and electronically, providing tremendous flexibility to end-users.