Annual Report 2009 (1 MB, pdf) - Vasco

Components of Security. Data and financial asset security, and secured access to and participation in
on-line commerce, generally consist of the following components:
• Encryption: Maintains data privacy by converting information into an unreadable pattern and
allowing only authorized parties to decrypt the data. Encryption can also maintain data integrity
by creating digital signatures for transmitted data, enabling the recipient to check whether the data
has been changed since or during transmission.
• Identification and Authentication: Serves as the foundation for other security mechanisms by
verifying that a user is who he or she claims to be. Identification and authentication mechanisms
are often employed with encryption tools to authenticate users, to determine the proper encryption
key for encrypting/decrypting data, or to enable users to digitally “sign” or verify the integrity of
transmitted data.
• Access Control: Software that provides authentication, authorization and accounting functions,
controlling a user’s access to only that data or the financial assets which he or she is authorized to
access, and that keeps track of a user’s activities after access has been granted.
• Administration and Management Tools: Software that sets, implements, and monitors security
policies, the access to which is typically regulated by access control systems. These tools are
extremely important to the overall effectiveness of a security system.
The most effective security policies employ most, if not all, of the above components. Many
companies, however, only implement a patchwork of these components, which could result in their security
systems being compromised.
Our Solution
We have found that, to date, most approaches to network security, including Internet security, have
been limited in scope and have failed to address all of the critical aspects of data security. We believe that an
effective enterprise-wide solution must address and assimilate issues relating to the following:
• Speed and ease of implementation, use and administration;
• Reliability;
• Interoperability within diverse enterprise environments, existing customer applications and the
security infrastructure;
• Scalability; and
• Overall cost of ownership.
Accordingly, we have adopted the following approach to data security:
• In designing our products, we have sought to incorporate industry-accepted, open and
non-proprietary protocols. This permits interoperability between our products and the multiple
platforms, products and applications widely in use.
• We have designed our products and services to minimize their integration effort with, and
disruption of, existing legacy applications and the security infrastructure. We provide customers
with easier implementations and a more rapid means of implementing security across the
enterprise, including the Internet. With security being a critical enabling technology for on-line
business initiatives, speed and ease of security implementation has become crucial to an
organization’s success.
• We design our products and services to have a more attractive total cost of ownership than
competing products and services. We have found that product improvements and tools that lower
a customer’s total cost of ownership create differentiating sales and marketing tools and also help
in the development of a highly loyal customer base that is open to new solutions that we offer.
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