Online travel company Expedia, Inc. has signed a strategic security deal with Entrust, Inc. to secure employees, partners, customers and the sensitive data they are trusted to keep safe.

Published: 30 Oct 2006

Online travel company Expedia, Inc. has signed a strategic security deal with Entrust, Inc. to secure employees, partners, customers and the sensitive data they are trusted to keep safe.

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.

“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’s 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,” added Holtz.

According to an official release, Entrust IdentityGuard is a comprehensive multi-factor authentication platform for Internet and enterprise applications. “This suite of strong authentication capabilities can help enable organisations to take a risk-based approach to tailoring a security deployment. The flexible deployment options can help enable organisations 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,” stated the company.

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.

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 360, a multi-protocol content monitoring and control solution that provides visibility into how sensitive content is handled in an organization. Content 360 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.

Entrust GetAccess is termed as a “high performance, scalable Web access control solution”, which 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,” added the release.

Entrust and Pointsec Mobile Technologies bring together 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.