Brief

VeriSign offers secure solutions for e-travel

Authenticated SSL, EV certification will enhance the image of online travel writes Sanjeev Bhar

The recent incident where tickets of the Beijing Olympics 2008’s inauguration ceremony were available online only for the whole thing to turn out to be a case of fraud was just another case of people parting with their credit card details and ending up the losers. Rajiv Chadha, VP Sales for VeriSign Services India, VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), provider of Internet infrastructure services, is of the opinion that the unwarranted situation could have been averted. The company has products that secure a portal’s back-end operations for safe e-commerce.

India’s e-commerce market is growing at a rapid clip. With 42-50% CAGR projected for the next five years, e-Travel (including hospitality) is the biggest contributor. Chadha said, “Travel is the biggest segment in the e-commerce domain in India and also on a worldwide basis. That said it is vital that travel portals are secure and that they offer the comfort of safe transactions to their customers.” Globally, 50 billion transactions take place every day and this is expected to reach a figure of four trillion per day by 2010. He added, “A company obtaining an Extended Validation (EV) Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate from VeriSign completely secures itself as far as customer identification is concerned.” This certificate ensures that the address bar of a visitor to the company’s authentic site turns green. Similarly, if someone visits any fraudulent Web site the address bar turns red. “This facility is a strong option for companies relying on online transactions e.g. various travel service bookings, hotel rooms, shopping, etc., and it helps keep impostor sites at bay," Chadha explained.

VeriSign is taking the idea of Identity Protection and Fraud Prevention solutions to the Indian travel and tourism sector addressing data theft (i.e. ticketing officials stealing credit card details etc.), e-Ticketing (IATA has set 2008 as the deadline for e-ticket rollout) and data security, retention and archival (securing data lying in laptops, shared folders and sometimes even on USB drives of professionals who travel frequently). It is also important to ensure that travel companies use the authentication process (in conjunction with encryption) to protect their online space. He added, “Authentication confirms the organization’s name in the certificate issued by VeriSign for its right to use a particular domain. This is vital when people traveling want to access a particular Web site,” Chadha concluded.