Background checks have become part and parcel of the hiring process throughout government. But one company now says constant monitoring is the only way to safeguard against insider risks and bad behavior. Earlier this month, InfoZen launched the general availability of its continuous monitoring service – IDentrix. The service was initially developed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to provide constant screening of flight school candidates.
Since then, the service has evolved and expanded to include a range of federal agencies. “The system is still used inside of homeland security for tracking people in the transportation sector, and to provide background screening,” explains IDentrix CEO Raj Ananthanpillai in an interview with CivSource.
IDentrix uses sophisticated analytics to continuously assess risk factors from all relevant criminal, financial and professional data sources to keep the risk profile of an individual current. “Vendors or local governments may not use the same level of screening as the federal government. We brought IDentrix to market to fill that gap,” Ananthanpillai says. “The system is straightforward, once you upload the identities of the people who will be monitored, you can set up the types of risk alerts you want to see. There is no IT footprint within the enterprise. It’s all cloud based.”
The software automatically monitors 65 different publicly available identity attributes including criminal and court records, when it identifies patterns of risky behavior, automated alerts are sent to the head of the organization. Users can customize what types of alerts they get, and establish weighting around risk factors more relevant to their specific organization. IDentrix also automatically creates a legally-defensible audit trail of background and behavior data to comply with all relevant security and privacy mandates.
Pricing comes in as low as $2 or under depending on the volume, per identity per month. The software allows organizations to not only monitor their own employees’ risk after they are hired, but also that of third-party contractors, suppliers, and partners. IDentrix is currently managing nearly 50,000 identities across the health care, transportation and financial services sectors.
Some state and local organizations have adopted the software as well. Real-Time Technology Group (RTTG) uses IDentrix to monitor its Secure Worker Program (SWAC), a group that includes seven regional Transportation Agencies, over 40 Union Locals, and over 30,000 actively contracted personnel who are responsible for building and maintaining World Trade Center and the New York metro region’s critical transportation infrastructure. According to the company’s CEO, Daniel Krantz, the SWAC program has proven effective in helping to secure these highly sensitive facilities.
“We see a future where individuals earn a ‘risk score,’ much like a credit score, that they can use to validate themselves for non-credit related activities,” Ananthanpillai said.
