EnterSpace for Security of Utilities — Regulated & Unregulated Electricity, Gas & Water--Run-time security decisioning including authentication support, coarse-to-fine-grained authorization, and federated attribute retrieval: improve access & security at the SAME time.

Utilities must continually strike a balance between user access and enterprise security. As more and more utilities rollout and improve customer self-care and increasingly sophisticated collaborative access portals for employees, vendors and partners; the tension between access and security only grows. Information technologists within the utility industry must secure enterprise resources and customer information while still improving quality of service. Add to this business driver, the fact that most applications in the utility industry were never built for Internet-sized user communities. Given these present day realities, a new enterprise product is needed for next generation access management and authorization. The EnterSpace Decisioning Service (EsDS) for Security is this product.

Every Request for a Secured Resource Is Individually Authorized — While many solutions exist within the access management and authorization space for the utility industry, most lack true real-time functionality. Those who need-to-know are identified statically and saved in an access-control-list (ACL) by a human administrator. The result is that the security model is only as current as the ACL, leading to coarse or poorly controlled security models and holes in the enterprise's security posture. As user community size increases and the number of secured resources under management continues to grow, maintenance of ACL's becomes progressively more prohibitive.

Many organizations have responded by “batching” updates to the ACL to minimize the volatility, but unfortunately this means that security decisions are only as accurate as the ACL is current. Traditional ACL driven models are inherently out of date, in that what is being saved is the RESULT of a security policy being applied to user-specific information. Therefore, the ACL is only as current as the moment it was created. The inability of this model to provide security implementations that accurately reflect “right-now” information, has prevented enterprises from sharing with customers, employees, partners and vendors all the information they might have a legitimate need-to-know — in effect, it has built walls that limit relationships and productivity. The EsDS for Security makes a real-time decision for every request to allow fine-grained, context-sensitive access decisions that are based upon CURRENT user information and security policies. It is time to tear down the walls between the enterprise and its users.

For Example — The utility industry has many different aspects of operations where security comes into play. The security of operational systems for controlling critical facilities such as power plants has become a Homeland Security issue, as has access to sensitive information such as fuel stockpiles, etc. Management and disclosure of information can be an issue that spans a user list numbering in the thousands, ranging from employees to suppliers and business partners to regulatory agencies. The definition of “need-to-know” may depend upon the current situation as well — access to information may well not be needed under normal operations, but become a critical item when responding to a disaster. The EsDS for Security is an ideal tool for capturing and managing such issues. Business rules can be made sensitive to contextual items such as weather conditions or Homeland Security Threat Status; as the Status is upgraded from yellow to orange the security rules may allow different levels of access to critical resources.

In addition, the utility industry is unusual in that utility companies generally maintain a direct customer relationship with millions of consumers — unusual in a traditional production/manufacturing model. Utility companies have to maintain large call centers of customer service personnel to assist customers in managing their accounts. Customer self-care has been an industry buzzword for the last few years as an attractive alternative to the cost of maintaining the call centers — perhaps the most difficult challenge to realizing customer self-care has been controlling what the customer is allowed to manage, and the conditions under which they are allowed to do so. The EsDS for Security enables this challenge to be effectively addressed, allowing complex access management policies to be captured and utilized within the CRM process for improved security and privacy.

Security Policies Centrally and Easily Administered; Enterprise-Wide — With Jericho Systems, security is a function brought to the enterprise level. Currently, security is managed on an application-by-application basis. From the ground up, the EsDS for Security is built for distributed administration of the security policies, allowing the owners of the resources being managed to directly control the policies defining access throughout the enterprise. This is a substantial change from traditional security models, where access controls are maintained both by the programmers who implement the code that checks the ACL, and by the security groups who maintain the ACL's themselves. The requirements of the resource owners are thus at least two steps removed from the decision, and the ability to effect change in the security policy is frequently inhibited by programmer availability. With Jericho Systems’ products, policy changes can be implemented by the resource owners directly, in real-time, and will be reflected upon the very next access request decision made. In addition, the GUI for the management of security policies is built for the non-technical, but business-savvy administrator.

Quickly Leverage Current Enterprise Investments for Increased Security Functionality — The EsDS for Security is designed to quickly integrate with previously deployed technologies including; identity management and authentication mechanisms.

Secure, Detailed Logs Provide Single-Point Auditability — Each time a request is made, the EsDS for Security writes a detailed event log to a repository. This log contains ALL the information relevant to the decision, including the identity of the requestor, the resource the requestor tried to access, the version of the policy used to determine whether to grant the request, any/all data values used in making the decision and the resulting decision itself. This log can be written to almost any storage form, including WORM (Write Once, Read Many) devices for non-changeable audit logs, or a database for handling reporting and ad-hoc queries.

Real-Time Alarms Allow “Right-Now” Response to Inappropriate Requests — When a request is denied for any reason, the EsDS for Security provides a mechanism whereby an alarm condition may be delivered to a system responsible for notifying individuals or components to respond to the event. For example, assume an employee is attempting to access a secured resource that is highly sensitive: sensitive enough that any denied request should initiate an alarm. Within the tool’s security policy definition process, an option is available to cause an alarm condition to be raised upon denial. At run-time, when the user’s access attempt is denied, the EsDS for Security generates an alarm message which details the user’s identity, the resource requested, and the reasons for the denial; then delivers it to a system of your choice. This might be an SNMP interface to an enterprise management console, an alert to a paging system, or any other form of electronic notification.

Collaboration — While information has long been perceived as having value within the business environment, the true value is actually in the services and products that can be derived from it. And in order to do that, information must be shared among all the people and systems that have a part to play in bringing those services/ products to life. This collaborative process has been limited severely in the past by the inability to share information freely among the participants while maintaining security of the data itself. Like water in a lake, your data has enormous potential. The water realizes that potential when it is put into motion to create energy. By enabling the sharing of information securely, the EsDS for Security helps put your data into motion to create business value.

TO SUMMARIZE: With the EsDS for Security, Utility Companies Gain Numerous Solutions; Including:

• Real-Time Access Management with Sensitivity to the Decision Context — As every request for access causes the evaluation of the appropriate security policy against user and situational attributes; fluid conditions like time-of-day, strength of authentication, etc., can be factored into access management policies.
• Create, Modify and Implement Enterprise Security Policies in Seconds — Security policies are managed by a common infrastructure and immediately affect the entire user community.
• Consistent Security Policy Evaluation, Enterprise-Wide — For secured resources under management by the software tool, the human element is eliminated from the evaluation process to improve security and reduce administrative costs.
• Distribute Security Policy Administration to Subject-Matter-Experts — Whoever owns the resource (application, function within an application, physical door, etc.) can administer the security policy for the resource without the need of software engineers.
• Flexible and Scaleable — While the EsDS for Security is built to work at the enterprise level; the tool's deployment can be limited to areas where current security models are ineffective or costly. This allows for quick and flexible impact. Pick the lowest hanging fruit first; then scale as needed. Resources that function well with existing security models can work side-by-side with resources that make use of the Suite for access management and authorization.
• Single Point Auditability — A secure event log captures information about the entire session, forming a single point for auditability and compliance purposes.
• Generate Alarms and Alerts at the Time of Attempted Violation — No need to parse through log files to find security breaches.
• Web Services Security, Single-Sign-On and Single-Sign-Out — One tool for an enterprise solution.
• Access Portals for Secured Interactive Environments and Self-Care — Controlled, 1-to-1 access portals are quickly enabled.
• Physical Security Management — The tool can also be used to manage physical security with the same consistent, rules-based infrastructure.

Utility Companies’ ROI in Jericho Systems is Derived from:

• Increased Security, Access, Collaboration and REVENUE — through real-time authorization deriving permissions and entitlements at run-time increasing functionality and results.
• Decreased Costs — through minimized administration of security; lessen the administrative burden of security policies, access control lists, user groups and security audits.
• Decreased Costs — through increased productivity brought about by single-point auditability and real-time alarms and alerts.
• Decreased Costs – from dramatically improved collaboration and self-care functionality.
• Decreased Costs — of software engineering. Externalizing security decisioning to a callable network service can drastically reduce code bases and thereby application development cycle times.

The EsDS for Security can perform hundreds of thousands of authorization decisions per second, for user communities and resources (items to be secured) in the tens-of-millions, in a real-time, parallel scaling, fault-tolerant environment.