From the News You Can Use Archives 10/17/06

Keeping Your Students' Information Secure
By Joe Blake, EDFUND Information Security Officer

EDFUND takes information security seriously, and we are focused on protecting our customers. So we partner with our lenders and support our schools and students by providing secure products and services to the education community. As we all become more aware of the consequences of poor information security, the need for easy-to-use, secure access to personal data has become more important.

At EDFUND, our objective is to ensure that your data is secure, has integrity and enables you to accomplish your goals. One of the ways we achieve this is through the use of identity management. Identity management is the process of ensuring that real-life users communicating electronically — whether a person, a device or a service — are in fact who or what they say they are.

Every user is assigned a digital identity that represents them in a network interaction with other systems or people.

The purpose of the digital identity is to restore the ease and security human transactions once had, when we all knew each other and did business face-to-face, updated for an environment where we are often meeting each other for the first time as we enter into electronic transactions across the world.

The digital identity only needs to be as complete as the particular transaction involved requires. That is to say, some transactions require a far more robust digital identity than others, since the degree of trust and information involved can vary significantly based on the type of transaction. For example, if you want to log into an e-mail account there is one level of security, but if you want to borrow $1 million then another applies. A digital identity consists of two parts: Who someone is (identity); and the credentials that they hold (attributes of that identity), which might be a password, a mother's maiden name or an account number.

So you might ask, how does identity management affect me? We try to keep the impact to a minimum. One practical example is single sign-on. This means you need to authenticate yourself (sign on) only one time for a set of transactions instead of signing on again for each individual transaction. Single sign-on ensures security as well as convenient access to the information you need to do your job. EDFUND's approach is to simplify the way that the education community interacts with regard to student loans. This means doing things in real time electronically with the same results as the hard-copy, paper world that we all are accustomed to.

EDFUND takes other significant steps to safeguard our customers' data. Those steps involve secure networks, computer systems, encryption and continuous monitoring of our data environment. The result is that we are continually providing new tools that help return the ease and trustworthiness of identity-based transactions that existed when interactions were done face-to-face, while maintaining the security and accountability that are essential when dealing with student loans.

As we prepare for 2007, look for innovative services that reflect the feedback we have received from the education community. Our focus will continue to be supporting schools, partnering with lenders, serving students, making higher education possible — it's what we were created for. It's what we do.

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From the October issue of NewSource, EDFUND's monthly newsletter providing timely, operational information to EDFUND customers and lender partners.

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Story posted October 17, 2006.

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