Published on the 19/02/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
In a connected world of people, things and enterprise, effective and efficient identity management and authentication is essential but complex…
Thomson Reuters will this year make available as open source code the identifier system it developed in order to index every listed company in the world. It’s part of a bid by the company to “externalise the information model” and “create an ecosystem for interoperability” according to Debra Walton, chief content officer for financial and risk at Thomson Reuters.
Walton, Australia-born but now New York resident, explained that Thomson Reuters takes in 1400 different data sets, and that by using its specially developed 256 bit code it had been possible to uniquely identify companies and the different data associated with each one so that the content could be searched and analysed.
Thomson Reuters has already introduced the technology in its own managed service Accelus Org ID, which is currently in use by a handful of international organisations (including a big-four Australian bank) to verify identities (useful for regulated entities which need to adhere to know-your-customer rules), and to screen and monitor all information available about a particular entity from different sources.
Walton said that open sourcing the technology would “make Thomson Reuters a more critical part of the data economy than a closed vendor”.
Being able to identify and authenticate the origins of data will be essential to internet-of-things deployments. Gartner this week issued a report warning that in its current form identity and access management (IAM) systems generally cannot provide the scale or manage the complexity that the IoT demands.
Ant Allan, research vice president at Gartner noted that a system for managing the ‘identity of things’ needed to be established in parallel with establishing the internet of things. “The ‘identity of things’ requires a new taxonomy for the participants in IAM systems. People, software that makes up systems, applications and services, and devices will all be defined as entities and all entities will have the same requirements to interact.”
An open-sourced identifier system such as that proposed by Thomson Reuters could help overcome the challenge.
Reuters may be a little late to the game however. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) last year launched a unique 13 digit business number for NZ businesses (NZBN). The numbers are managed by the global standards organisation GS1, who manage the scheme around the world.
Identity management is also exercising the Commonwealth Bank which last week revealed that it had spent around $40 million to buy South Africa-based technology company Tyme (Take Your Money Everywhere) which has developed an identity authentication platform to support mobile phone based banking.
Tyme was spun out of a 2012 Deloitte initiative and captures customer information and then authenticates that against data from Africa’s Department of Home Affairs National Identity System and from biometrics stores.
