The demand of identity and access management solution is all time high nowadays, but no matter it is a smart card or a PIn or keys, they all revolve around identity. All of these solutions offer the user an identity to access secure areas but again, there is no way these solutions can prevent users to borrow, lose or steal these identities. Biometric solution has however solved this problem by encouraging users to use their own identities to gain access thereby boosting security.
After the tragic 9/11 incident, the US government started spending billions in better and more secure identity and access management solutions. This gave rise to the giant biometric industry with better technical expertise. By the end of 2007, the federal government was all set to adopt these identity management platforms but many other sectors like educational institutes, healthcare industries, etc were still tied with the traditional IAM solutions.
So yes, the adoption of biometric solutions was not as rapid as expected but the change was visible. With the evolvement of technology and increasing security risk, biometric solutions have started getting traction but still there are many factors that are responsible for slow adoption of biometric solutions. Let’s find out what are those!
Major challenges faced by biometric adoption :
- It is complicated :
Every biometric solution provide comes with its own biometric admin system which is absolutely different from the access control manufacturer’s software system. Therefore if you want to use biometric solution, the admin must be able to manage two different systems, introduce additional complexity. Not many identity and access solution providers have integrated themselves with the biometric solutions, reasons stated above and even those who have, are facing difficulties keeping up with the quickly changing technologies.
- It is expensive :
Cost! Need I say it matters the most? The high development costs combined with the initial lower volume sales, forced biometric providers to balance out their investments by offering a very high price. Most of the businesses opted card option because of the pricing gap between biometric solution and traditional legacy solution.
- User on-boarding rates too low :
When you talk about biometric solutions, there has been no diagnostic tool that can measure the initial user enrollment quality or help troubleshooting customer issues or above all, finetune performance and which is why, most of the adoptions took place with a “card plus biometric” approach also known as 1:1 match. This approach required the user to use both the finger as well as card authenticate himself. But hey, why would anyone move to biometric approach and still keep using cards? However 1:1 matching is no longer required as now server matching can allow identity verification for 50,000 to 500,000 at any time throughout the connected biometric solution.
- Lack of awareness :
The lack of proper training for the secure integration is another major factor that hampered the adoption of biometric solution. Not only proper knowledge but the complete installation guide was also expected but the absence of proper training resulted in less deployments and less profits for biometric providers.
But what the present is holding for us?
The only key to eliminate these barrier is to listen to the needs of the security community. One great example of this is BioConnect technology which provides easy integration between traditional access control systems and biometric readers and all other devices. Do you know by the end of 105, around 619 million people will be using biometric on mobile, as predicted by Google Intelligence Forecasts. Similarly, Gartner said, by 2016, 40% of the smartphones will be integrated with biometric feature. Needless to say, we are witnessing the dawn of the latest wave named, “biometric everything”!
But this adoption is not that easy! To make certain that these predictions come true, businesses must offer a solution which is flexible, scalable, fast, easy-to-deploy and affordable too and that’s where BYOI or BYOID (Bring Your Own Identity) comes into the role.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Identity) : The future
With the way, technology is evolving and being adopted, it won’t be wrong to say that by the end of 2020, we all would be living in the world of BYOID. Taking a look at 1o years ago, the trend was quite new. BYOID lets employees and other third parties to arrive office with their own technology. Also, this trend gave rise to the adoption of personal mobile device usage. Similarly, with so many options and ID wearables, it won’t be wrong to predict a future where employees will use their own identities to gain access, both physically as well as virtually.