According to a survey of enterprises by London-based industry analysis Datamonitor, smart card security solutions not only increase the protection of physical and logical access but can also result in savings of more than $2 million for every 2,000 employees. Commissioned by Siemens Communications Inc., the survey measured the return on investment of 53 organizations with smart card deployments. Datamonitor explored current authentication practices and the potential benefits of converging logical and physical access solutions.
Verifying a user’s identity before granting access to facilities or information technology (IT) systems is hardly a new concept. Passwords, building access cards and photo IDs have been used for decades. For some applications, such as remote access to IT resources, one-time-password tokens are used to increase security. However, each has multiple associated costs such as administration, software, hardware and maintenance.