Identity. It’s the basis of security. Do you know how you can use your identity to make things secure over the Internet? Huge growth in the Internet as a primary means of communicating and conducting business, coupled with the growth of applications, such as e-mail, instant messaging (IM), Voice Over IP (VoIP), and Web services, has contributed to the proliferation of multiple identities for all of us to keep track of and passwords to manage for each of them. Traditional models for security are not designed to handle the resulting complexity or capable of scaling to millions of users. Thus the need for Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) technology from Voltage Security.
Enterprise Privacy Management
According to Wasim Ahmad, vice president of Marketing at Voltage, “Voltage provides an effective, less costly, and totally scalable approach for encrypting business communication. Using Voltage IBE does not require complex pre-enrollment or revocation checking. Instead, a recipient’s public key is derived from his or her identity. Voltage IBE is so simple because the public key is based on the e-mail address. This innovation removes the need to distribute digital certificates — making the solution incredibly easy to use for consumers — cuts out the complexity of infrastructure and provides levels of scalability unobtainable with current solutions. With seamless integration with Microsoft® Office Outlook® and Microsoft Exchange, we are helping large enterprises secure their most trusted relationships — with employees, business partners, and consumers.”
Voltage’s solution has won several awards, including the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer award and, most recently, the Frost & Sullivan 2006 “Product Innovation of the Year Award” in the field of secure messaging.
Voltage IBE is also a key component of the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Encryption, one of the four distinct managed services that make up the hosted services. These services minimize upfront capital investment, free up IT resources, and empower companies to concentrate on areas most critical to their business.
“E-mail encryption made available as a service is the most cost- effective way to protect sensitive information flowing to and from the enterprise,” says Sathvik Krishnamurthy, president and CEO of Voltage Security. “Voltage IBE is the only encryption solution that provides the scalability required for both enterprise and managed service environments.”
E-Mail Security Solution
HealthAxis, a leading provider of fully integrated business process outsourcing and claims administration technology solutions, needed an e-mail security solution that protected patient health information and other sensitive data. HealthAxis also wanted to send encrypted e-mail and attachments between e-mail client software without account setup and without a remote server that would raise the possibility of security leaks.
“By integrating Voltage SecureMail into our IT infrastructure, we didn’t just improve our service offerings, we established a leadership position in secure communications moving forward. Having to manage a different encryption solution for each client would have been a problem,” explains Will Long, director of IT Security for HealthAxis.
Microsoft Partnership
“The Microsoft-Voltage partnership extends across sales, marketing, and product groups and has been invaluable in showing enterprise customers the strategic nature of the Voltage Security solution,” says Krishnamurthy. “By focusing on the Microsoft platform, we gain efficiencies in product development — we can rapidly deliver our solution on the Windows Mobile® 5 environment or easily integrate with Windows LiveTM ID service, designed to manage identity and trust within the Windows Live ecosystem. Further, as charter members of the SecureIT alliance, we have early access to software releases and benefit from working with the top companies in security.”
According to Ann Winblad, founding partner of Hummer Winblad Ventures, on the significance of the Microsoft partnership: “The fact that Microsoft now provides this same encryption technology as a service in its Exchange Hosted environment means that it is now possible to have a common data protection architecture in place that secures data inside and outside the organization, opening up new channels for business.”
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