SECURITY TECHNOLOGYEntity Resolution: The Security Technology You Probably Haven’t Heard Of
The concept “entity resolution” (ER) is probably unfamiliar, but it underpins much of the world’s security—in telecommunications, banking and national security.
The concept is probably unfamiliar, but it underpins much of the world’s security—in telecommunications, banking and national security. It’s entity resolution (ER), the technology for consolidating disparate data about someone or something, which isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds.
Modern security and intelligence organizations have critical and sensitive data that they need to review, but it may be siloed, hard to access or manually intensive to bring together. ER is increasingly essential in human, cyber and data-led intelligence operations, for gathering information across datasets. With the ever-increasing availability of data, organizations are becoming reliant on systems that unlock insights from their existing datasets, including ER.
At its core, ER is simple. The system brings together all the information in your data that relates to a single customer, criminal, asset or threat so that you can make informed decisions. ER helps analysts find the needle in the haystack and rapidly builds a complete picture of all relevant information. The market for ER systems is predicted to become a multi-billion-dollar industry in the next decade, with mostly US companies leading the way.
ER is a fundamental enabler of AI and data-driven organizations. Organizations with a lot of data need to know what they know. Equally, those in national security need to know what they don’t know. This enables them to acquire the missing glue data—information that identifies new links between entities and can help join the entities together.
ER is also used by police for mapping organized criminal networks, immigration officers for reviewing your passport and other relevant data, casinos for detecting fraudsters and banks for conducting know-your-customer (KYC) checks to prevent sanctions evasion. Global KYC regulation requires banks to collate information on individuals so that they can conduct due diligence investigations and avoid facilitating criminal activities.
Outside the security domain, ER can enable marketing departments to better understand their customers and help finance teams to identify payments to suppliers. ER works with internal data and can be augmented by external data providers, bringing together relevant information in one view.
Entity-based resolution can also be used to identify links in obscured or deceptive behaviors known as ‘channel separation’, such as the use of a burner phone. This helps track down criminals, fraudsters, terrorists and spies who separate identifiers across different data channels or collection methods.
