Expedia Selects Entrust as Strategic Partner for Securing Identities and Information
World's leading online travel company purchases suite of security software from Entrust
30 Oct 2006
Dallas, Texas - Credit card numbers, passport documentation, names and ages of children. Of all online transaction portals, travel websites probably handle the widest variety of sensitive and personal information. Add that to the number of airline, hotel, rental car agencies and other vendors travel websites must facilitate, and securing that sensitive information becomes both a critical and daunting task. That is why Expedia, Inc. [NASDAQ: EXPE], the world's leading online travel company, has signed a strategic security deal with Entrust, Inc. [NASDAQ: ENTU] to secure employees, partners, customers and the sensitive data they are trusted to keep safe.
"Security can be a limitation to the growth of many companies, and we did not want that. Instead, we wanted to take security issues out of the equation, so we could concentrate on growing our business," said Expedia Chief Information Officer Bill Holtz. "That is why we took a more holistic approach with our security - one that gives us the ability to protect our intellectual property while securely opening our borders to our partners, suppliers and providers. In addition, we needed to make sure our employees could have access to the files they needed securely from anywhere in the world. We chose Entrust because they could give us the security to empower the trusted ecosystem we need to flourish."
As part of the strategic deal, Entrust will provide Entrust IdentityGuard for employee and partner authentication; Entrust GetAccess for web single sign-on and access control for employees and partners; Entrust Entelligence to secure messaging and mobile data protection. Entrust partners that will support the Expedia deal include Pointsec, Vericept and Sun Microsystems.
"Expedia has been a pioneer leveraging the online channel to provide a rich set of services to consumers. With this step, they continue their visionary leadership and are raising the bar for security expectations for all online providers," said Entrust Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Bill Conner. "Instead of waiting for a high profile data breach or regulatory pressure, Expedia decided to be proactive to maintain the high level of trust its customers have long enjoyed. We are proud to be a strategic partner as they lead the way into this new level of customer security assurance."
Expedia, Inc. is the world's leading online travel company, empowering business and leisure travelers with the tools information they need to easily research, plan, book, and experience travel. Expedia, Inc. also provides wholesale travel offline retail travel agents. Expedia, Inc.'s portfolio of brands include: Expedia.com®, Hotels.com®, Hotwire Expedia® Corporate Travel, TripAdvisor™ and Classic Vacations®. Expedia, Inc.'s companies also operate internationally with sites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia and China, through its investment in eLong™.
"Data loss and information leaks are not random acts of nature too costly to prevent,” said Gartner Research Vice President Rich Mogull in a recent Gartner report* in which he outlined the top five steps to prevent data loss and information leaks. These include content monitoring and filtering, encrypting backup tapes and (maybe) mass storage, secure workstations, restrict home computers and lock portable storage, encrypt laptops and deploy database activity monitoring. “By following these fives steps, enterprises can dramatically reduce the risk of their valuable information ending up in the wrong hands and forcing an embarrassing public disclosure."
Entrust IdentityGuard is a comprehensive multi-factor authentication platform for Internet and enterprise applications. This suite of strong authentication capabilities can help enable organizations to take a risk-based approach to tailoring a security deployment. The flexible deployment options can help enable organizations to match strong authentication methods to the level of risk they have determined to be associated with the different types of users, transactions and applications in their environments.
Sun Identity Manager will be deployed to centrally manage user identities for employees and supply chain portal users, simplifying provisioning of identities into a range of internal systems and providing a central audit point concerning which identities are active in the system.
"Identity management is an important foundation component for a security infrastructure such as Expedia's," commented Neal Civjan, Sun Vice President of Worldwide OEM Software Sales. "Sun's commitment to deliver innovation in security and identity management that our customers value, helps them cost-effectively manage the processes and audit requirements related to internal and external user identities, and we look forward to working with Entrust and Expedia to make the deployment a success."
Entrust also will provide Entrust Entelligence™ Messaging Server to make it easier for Expedia to communicate securely with external business partners and customers. In addition, Entrust will offer Vericept Content 360º, a multi-protocol content monitoring and control solution that provides visibility into how sensitive content is handled in an organization. Content 360º is designed to operate with Entrust Entelligence Messaging Server to help identify which messages should be encrypted before they leave the boundary of an organization. This powerful combination allows policy-based encryption of all messages based on message content, as well as monitoring of other network traffic including instant messaging and FTP.
"As organizations rely on email for communication each and every day it is imperative that confidential documents are protected during transmission to avoid interception by unauthorized users, which could result in potential data loss," said Dave Parkinson, President and CEO of Vericept. "We are proud to work closely with Entrust to support the security needs of a visionary company like Expedia."
Entrust GetAccess is a high performance, scalable Web access control solution. It centrally manages access to multiple applications through a single portal, providing users with single sign-on to the applications and content they are authorized to see. With the broadest support for user authentication methods, flexible roles and rules-based access control, self-service features, and proven performance to millions of users, Entrust GetAccess enables organizations to reduce administration costs while driving more services through their Web portal.
Entrust and Pointsec Mobile Technologies bring together their award-winning security capabilities in a set of products designed to protect information in laptops and desktops. This solution allows automatic encryption of all data stored on a hard drive that is transparent to the end user. The solution also enables customers to use Entrust Digital Identities to manage access to PCs and laptops protected by Pointsec for PC. An example of a security benefit is in the case where an Entrust digital identity is revoked -- the Pointsec software will automatically deny that user access to the device.
"Expedia recognized what those of us in the security business have known for a long time. We're never going to stop laptops and mobile devices from being lost, stolen or otherwise compromised, so protecting data stored on them and securing access to corporate networks must be automated and taken out of the hands of employees," said Pointsec Chief Executive Officer Peter Larsson. "Increasingly, companies need a disk encryption solution that has excellent centralized management tools for easy data recovery and provides self service capabilities for the user."
*Source: Gartner "Top Five Steps to Prevent Data Loss and Information" Rich Mogull, July 12, 2006.