Durban, 29 Oct 2010
The KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Treasury is visibly discouraging fraud, educating its personnel about electronic fraud, and most importantly, protecting innocent people from being implicated in cases of this type of crime with e-DNA, a transversal Electronic Fraud Management System (EFMS).
SITA, Datacentrix and its business partner, L@Wtrust, collaborated to assist the department in establishing this proactive approach in electronic fraud management.
According to Zweli Mkhize, the Premier of KwaZulu-Natal, the value of the system is realised when one considers that, as a province, KZN controls a budget of R50 billion a year. “If one percent of these funds is lost through fraud it amounts to R500 million of taxpayers' money lost per year,” explains Mkhize. “The escalation of computer-related crimes across the public and private sector made it necessary to take preventative measures to avoid fraud.”
The KZN Treasury initially approached SITA with its requirements in this regard, and Tubatsana Monareng and his Information Security team set out to find the ideal solution. From the outset it was clear - finding an enterprise class solution fit for the stringent requirements of KZN Treasury, suitable for the South African context, that would also work across multiple mainframe and open system applications and all the government departments of KZN Treasury and be compliant with the South African legislation as well as international good practices and standards, was not going to be an easy task.
“Given the significant risk of electronic fraud, KZN Treasury wanted to implement a consistent and pragmatic approach to enable the proactive management of electronic fraud as fast as possible to in excess of 4 000 of its computer users scattered across the KZN province and operating from 16 federated government departments,” explains Shakeel Jhazbhay, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) business unit manager for KwaZulu-Natal at Datacentrix.
“The department prioritised the protection of its core mainframe applications (BAS and PERSAL) for the initial phase of the plan.”
The SITA team worked closely with KZN Treasury to refine and evaluate the department's business requirements and found that it needed an enterprise class Electronic Fraud Management System (EFMS). The solution had to deliver strong multi-factor access control and identity management, PKI cryptography, context sensitive non-repudiation and forensic reporting capabilities. Additionally, it needed to be capable of working across disparate networks and support mainframe and open system applications. SITA and KZN Treasury collaborated in the evaluation of the available solutions and awarded a tender for the requirements to Datacentrix and L@Wtrust to implement the locally developed e-DNA, EFMS solution suite.
“In essence, the e-DNA solution behaves like an intelligent surveillance system inside the protected applications,” explains Jhazbhay. “It 'records' changes to transactional information and can action business rules when sensitive behaviour is sensed.”
The solution effectively yields an always-on, reliable and impartial witness to sensitive transactional data. It supports information integrity in that the e-DNA Evidence Vault delivers a context sensitive audit trail that carries sufficient evidentiary weight of exactly who did what, and when it was done inside the application.
e-DNA is an extensible and modular EFMS solution that makes it ideal for enterprise environments with transversal applications. The strong sign on module, for example, eliminates password theft and abuse through secure multi-factor access control and identity management, which is integrated with industry standard FIPS rated PKI, biometric and smartcard technology, which then interacts cryptographically with the e-DNA Evidence Vault.
A high degree of re-usability of system components makes for good investment protection and yields a cost-effective roadmap to expand the system to also protect other applications such as logistics, procurement and other line of business applications.
The Datacentrix offering spanned the entire solution life cycle and Thansen Singh, Information Technology manager for the KZN Provincial Treasury, said that his team rates its satisfaction with SITA and Datacentrix team on this project as very high, and that they are now ready to start realising the benefits of people accountability in the digital world.
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