Enterprise Biometrics Month: The Roundup

Posted on April 25, 2019

As the biometrics revolution has continued to accelerate over the last several years, the enterprise sector has proven to be one of the ripest areas of adoption. Businesses and other organizations have always had particular security needs, and in the past these have been met with solutions like office keys and security guards. But as in other sectors like government, financial services, and healthcare, the business world has been just as swept up in the wave of digitization that the 21st century has delivered, and this has brought new risks. As a result, these days, enterprise administrators are less concerned about losing the keys to their offices or locked cabinets than they are about password and username combinations falling into the wrong hands, with digital security threats now being a critical concern.

Passwords go into Retirement

This context was the foundation for our primer for Enterprise Biometrics Month, “Passwords go into Retirement“, which explained how biometric technologies are being used to address these new digital threats. Citing survey data from Spiceworks and Javelin Research, the feature illustrated the growing trend of enterprise IT administrators embracing biometric and multi-factor authentication solutions, and looked to biometrics leaders like IDEMIA and BioConnect to see how they were addressing this growing market.

The feature also noted some of the prominent factors driving the enterprise biometrics market, including the increasingly obvious threat of data breaches, the emergence of new regulations like the European Union’s PSD2, the emergence of Bring Your Own Device culture in many workplaces, and growing employee demand for convenient authentication solutions.

New Frontiers

So what exactly does all of this look like in practice? To illustrate, our next feature for Enterprise Biometrics Month, “New Frontiers in Enterprise Security“, looked at some of the latest cutting-edge biometric solutions aimed at the enterprise market. A new app from Ipsidy, for example, capitalizes on the excitement over Apple’s Face ID system by enabling selfie-based authentication with facial recognition. Meanwhile, IriSafe offers an enterprise authentication solution based on iris recognition and blockchain technology, and a solution from Veridium combines behavioral biometrics with facial or fingerprint recognition.

These are relatively unique solutions reflecting the cutting edge of enterprise biometrics, but in broad terms they illustrate the unique advantages offered by biometric approaches. They allow employees to confirm their identities conveniently, while also ensuring a level of security that can far surpass that offered by passwords – the key proposition driving the enterprise sector’s demand for biometric technologies.

A ‘Great Convergence’ in Enterprise Access

Having illustrated that overarching trend pretty clearly, for our last Enterprise Biometrics Month feature, we delved into the next big trend within the field of enterprise biometrics – ‘The Great Convergence‘. This harkens back to our primer’s discussion of digital enterprise security and the growing role of biometrics therein; and at the same time, it considers another prominent use case in the enterprise sector: biometric access control. Traditionally, these fields have been distinct, with cybersecurity specialists offering biometric solutions tailored for enterprise IT, and access control experts increasingly incorporating biometrics into their own offerings. But the big trend taking shape now is the combination of these approaches, with the aim of establishing uniform biometric credentials across the enterprise, from getting through the front door to accessing the backend IT environment.

The trend was particularly clear at this year’s ISC West event, with our feature drawing on interviews with industry experts to help make the case that this is the big new paradigm shift to pay attention to. And once again, we saw how leaders like BioConnect and IDEMIA were already at the vanguard of this frontier, with the convergence of digital and physical access poised to revitalize enterprise security.

The Experts Talk Shop

Finally, Enterprise Biometrics Month just closed out with the latest entry in FindBiometrics’ renowned webinar series, “Enterprise Biometrics in the Era of the Data Breach”. The panel discussion featured BioConnect CEO Rob Douglas, IDEMIA VP Gary Jones, and ISC West organizer Will Wise, and touched on a number of hot topics in enterprise biometrics. A full recording of the webinar is embedded above, offering an insider look into the growing enterprise biometrics market. It’s a fitting recap for much of what we’ve covered over the course of Enterprise Biometrics Month, and a vivid illustration of the dynamism in the market today.