Accenture and Sun aim to widen security scope

Accenture and Sun are working together to tackle what they say is the growing security threat posed by computer fraud and terrorism, and are launching the Accenture Smart Identity Solution for identity management of individuals.

Coming in the same week as debate over the government's counter-terrorism bill, an official statement from both companies says the newly announced system uses both biometric and smartcard technologies for identity establishment. It also features access-management technologies to address increasingly stringent compliance requirements thrown up by the rise in globalisation.

Accenture and Sun say this group of products provides pre-built, implementation-ready offerings that connect existing applications, such as a human-resource database, with new biometric and biographic record-keeping to produce an automated identity-management process.

Its multi-factor authentication for managing user access to IT systems and physical facilities means that a user can be forced to have two forms of identification, such as a smartcard in addition to a password, to verify identity.

"The establishment of user identity and the management of user access are often viewed independently by many organisations," said Alastair MacWillson, managing director of Accenture's Security practice. "The integrated enterprise view our solutions offer, more accurately reflects the full identity-management lifecycle and enables a true end-to-end chain of trust. As a result, businesses and governments can improve security and compliance, while increasing operational efficiency, improving customer and citizen satisfaction, [and] at the same time, decreasing IT administrative cost and complexity."

The new system was built using the Sun Java System Identity Management Suite and the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite with the Solaris operating system and Sun Java System Portal Server. It has been produced as a result of development at the Accenture Innovation Centre for Sun Microsystems Solutions, which develops solutions for identity enabled service oriented architectures and composite applications.