FUTURE TECHNOLOGY
Building a tap based access control platform
Organisations need to consider integrated access control platforms to jointly secure IT applications and physical access, recommends Tim Phipps from HID Global.
With the move to a mobile and cloud first world, corporate data has become increasingly difficult to protect. Employee expectations have changed – they want to be able to access corporate cloud applications, data and services anywhere, at any time, using the device of their choice. This can potentially make networks significantly more vulnerable to security breaches.
Reliance on passwords alone is not enough. When hackers steal an employee’ s user name and password, they can often move through the network undetected and upload malware programmes to other systems. Now, with the advent of a security model called tap authentication, it is possible to control access to data with a much more convenient process, using the same identification card that controls access to a company’ s facilities.
With tap authentication, users simply tap their smart cards to laptops, tablets, phones and other NFC-enabled devices for easy and convenient access to network resources, cloud applications and webbased services. This quick tap of the card to a device is much easier and secure than passwords. It is faster and more seamless and convenient than dedicated hardware one-time passwords or other physical devices. Perhaps most important for users, it offers the convenience of being able to access data and cloud-based applications with the same card that opens doors.
Today’ s threats will not diminish anytime soon. Nor will the cost of a data breach. IBM recently announced in its Security Services Cyber Security Intelligence Index Report that phishing, malware and other cyber threats are now costing organisations up to 19 % in revenue and 21 % in lost productivity, amongst other financial hits. Protecting access to corporate data is becoming more crucial. One of the biggest problems is an over-reliance on passwords. Identifying and validating workforce identities used to be relatively easy and relied on the combination of a username and a password that users typed in to a PC to authenticate themselves to the machine and to the network. Workforce computer users had one password, and that password was used in one place only: at a stationary workstation in the office or at home. Once the user logged in, they had access to every application they needed to do their job.
Today, however the enterprise landscape is rapidly changing. We now live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world where there is no longer a single device that is used to access corporate data and services. On top of this, corporate security policies have changed, requiring users to authenticate themselves more often. For example, employees at the National
28 Issue 03 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS