IdentityGuard Solution from Entrust and MasterLink Selected by US Financial Services Company

Strong authentication solution selected due to ease of use and low cost

14 Feb 2006

DALLAS – Entrust, Inc. [NASDAQ: ENTU], a world leader in securing digital identities and information, today announced that MasterLink and Entrust have partnered to provide a strong authentication solution to a financial services institution in the United States.  Entrust IdentityGuard was selected over more costly and complicated alternatives such as time synchronous tokens and is currently being rolled out to users. 

In September 2005, the financial institution recognized the need to implement a stronger form of authentication than user name and password as a means to identify employees accessing the corporate network via virtual private networks (VPN).  As a trusted advisor in this effort, MasterLink, a Premier Value Added Reseller of the Entrust TrustedPartner Program, was enlisted to provide assistance in identifying possible solutions. The choices were narrowed to a few, including Entrust IdentityGuard and time synchronous tokens.

“As we started the assessment effort, one option would have been to leverage tokens that were already in use in other areas across the organization.  However, after testing Entrust IdentityGuard, the choice became clear,” said Matt Massa, Director of Engineering from MasterLink.  “Entrust IdentityGuard was easy to use, a fraction of the token costs and easy to implement. Start to finish, the assessment, piloting, evaluation and procurement process took less than 60 days – far shorter than what was expected.”

“We continue to gain traction with Entrust IdentityGuard,” said Kevin Simzer, Senior Vice President with Entrust. “Enterprises are beginning to realize that they can slash their current authentication costs by more than 80 percent by making the switch to Entrust, while rolling out a solution that is easy to use with unprecedented flexibility.  These cost savings are real, and organizations implementing strong authentication or entering token renewal cycles are realizing that these savings are significant.”

Entrust IdentityGuard is a comprehensive strong authentication solution for consumer and enterprise applications. This suite of strong authentication capabilities can help enable an organization to take a risk-based approach with its security deployment. The flexible deployment options can help match strong authentication methods to the level of risk associated with the different types of users, transactions and applications.  Through layered strong authentication methods – including two-factor authentication and mutual authentication – across different users and transaction types, Entrust IdentityGuard can help reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions and an organization’s security expenditures.  Please visit the Entrust website for more information.