IBM has created new software that helps companies share
information without revealing its origin, a breakthrough at a time when
protecting user identities remains a major challenge.
DB2 Anonymous Resolution helps customers share records or documents with
other organizations while protecting the identity of individuals involved in
a data exchange.
The software, designed to thwart identity theft, or accidental information
disclosure, employs irreversible digital signatures that keep data from
being observed in its original form.
This type of technology can help in such areas as privacy and regulatory
compliance and in due diligence for mergers and acquisitions, or even in
medical fields. For example, the software may be used by hospitals to share
and correlate data that has been stripped of personal information for
medical research.
Anonymous Resolution is the newest product from IBM’s entity analytics
business, which was known as SRD before IBM acquired
it in January 2005 to boost its information management business. It fits squarely into IBM’s information management business, which lets customers share and analyze data across a variety of computing sources, including different applications, databases and repositories.
John Slitz, vice president of IBM entity analytics, said Anonymous
Resolution was originally known as Anna under SRD. The software follows
SRD’s creation of Eric and Nora, which became DB2 Identity Resolution and
DB2 Relationship Resolution, respectively.
Slitz, former CEO at SRD prior to Big Blue’s acquisition, said one scenario
where Anonymous Resolution can make a difference is in comparing a list of
customers in a financial institution and a list of money launderers.
“You can compare the two, ‘anonymizing’ both lists, and only those where there
was a deterministic match between the bad-guy list and the customer list
would be alerted,” he said.
Separately, IBM said it has leveraged its Tivoli management software and
Rational software development lines to propose new products that can zero in
on and repair glitches in business applications.
IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit for Rational Application Developer and IBM
Performance Optimization Toolkit for Rational Performance Tester cut
software fix times from days to hours, or even minutes.
The Rational products borrow troubleshooting perks from Tivoli’s Monitoring
for Transaction Performance software, which helps customers diagnose
and fix transaction performance problems.