Verizon is expanding its prowess in corporate security with the achievement of securing three out of four levels of federal certifications to issue digital credentials.
Specifically, Verizon has been reached Level 1, 2 and 3 of the the Identity, Credential and Access Management (ICAM) certification system.
ICAM is not a identity and security mandate, but rather a set up of recommendations issued by a subcommittee co-chaired by the General Services Administration and the Department of Defense. The guidelines are responsible for aligning the government’s identity management activities to help safeguard online identities.
Verizon boasts that it is the first company to be granted Levels 2 and 3 certification. Prospective customers and beneficiaries could be federal agencies looking to outsource authentication processes and even private sector businesses interested in cloud-based Identity-as-a-service management.
Verizon Enterprise Identity Services will be available via the cloud and are aimed at facilitating identity management without any additional hardware or software required.
However, an easy question before signing up with Verizon (and future providers with these certifications) would be to ask why would companies want outsource identities to begin in the first place.
Verizon’s chief identity strategist Tracy Hulver responded by first pointing out that a lot of people don’t use second-factor authentication because of costs and hardware security tokens often offer some level of comfort. Such arguments can easily be applied to debates over moving to the cloud as many companies still feel more comfortable with having everything on-site.
However, Hulver asserted that this can actually reduce costs for companies because the identity verification technology could be installed on smartphones, thus being less intrusive and expensive for companies to set up.
Furthermore, Hulver explained that Verizon could implement things that a normal identity infrastructure couldn’t, such as tying in risk analytics and related data.
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