Security and recession

How the need for Biometrics in increasing despite the economic downturn!

According to the United States Department of Labor more than 3.3 Million jobs have been lost in the past 5 months in the U.S. and The International Labor Organization reports global unemployment could reach 38 Million by the year’s end. These are stark figures that are becoming part of a new reality in these challenging economic times.

There are many personal hardships and global social implications as a result of the downturn and the world is in a continual state of readjustment. The crisis has a far reach, not just touching affected individuals, but also impacting organizations in the area of workforce productivity and heightened security concerns.

Insider threats have long been and will continue to be one of the greatest risks facing organizations, especially in these new times. In addition there is tremendous pressure on organizations to tightly manage costs to ensure the organization is operating productively and profitably. When it comes to security and productivity there are the 2 primary affected areas: workforce management (Time & Attendance) and physical access control, which ensures only valid employees have access to restricted and protected areas of an organization.

With new levels of personal frustration and uncertainty in a workforce, there is a need to examine security policies to make certain the intellectual property of an organization is protected. There is a pressing need to prevent unauthorized access to specific areas or information that can make an organization more vulnerable. Temporary staff can present an increased source of risk if they lack the sense of loyalty to an organization as they might be less keen on reporting unusual activities. Higher turnover rates leads to the need for provisioning and de-provisioning more often, and most important making sure this process is executed accurately.

Another pressing issue is controlling Time and Attendance management and streamlining it with a reliable access system. Time and Attendance system abuse can lead to significant cost waste and loss of profitability. Traditional paper or card based systems are prone to fraud and lend themselves to the practice of "buddy punching" which allows one person to clock in for another. For an organization with any size of employee base, this is a real threat to cost, efficiency, loss of productivity and issue is compounded the larger the size.

Many of the solutions to date - passwords, ID cards and tokens to name a few - have been far from adequate. They fail to properly secure information in a manner appropriate to the highly sensitive nature of data that a corporation may need to collect. Passwords are all too often forgotten or written down and can be stolen using keystroke loggers. ID cards can also be easily stolen, lost or forged and tokens, too, can go missing.

Biometrics is a much safer solution - a biometric can't be stolen, misplaced, forgotten or copied. Biometric solutions use what a person is rather than what they know or carry for identification purposes, making it more secure and convenient than other authentication methods that have come before. Fingerprint and face recognition readers are currently the most popular types of biometric technology on the market with 38.1% and 19.3% of the non-AFIS biometric market revenue respectively, according to the International Biometric Group's Biometrics Market and Industry Report 2007-2012.

L-1's V-Station 4G fingerprint reader (left) and 3D FastPass face reader (right) are among the industry's leading biometric readers for physical access control

As one of the leaders in the Biometrics industry, L-1 Enterprise Access Solutions improve management of Time and Attendance systems by reducing administrative costs and increasing productivity. This eliminates the need to deal with the timesheet inaccuracies and personnel can now concentrate on higher value activities. Through the use of smart authentication devices in conjunction with a time and attendance system or access control system, it is possible to automatically and in real-time validate employees and know who is on a particular site with a credential that cannot be shared or lost and that is "each person's unique fingerprint or facial structure."

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You can rely on us to help eliminate paper-based time sheets which are time consuming, prone to data entry errors and that must be verified individually by managers.

Administrators do not need to worry about shared or lost access credentials such as cards and PINs. With L-1 enterprise access solutions, changing access levels and deleting a terminated employee's record is centralized and convenient, ensuring they no longer have access to company property and assets.

According to Don Yong at Regional Transportation District of Denver "Security at the Treasury has been increased significantly. L-1 3D face readers are an elegant and simple solution that will present a significant challenge to anyone attempting to gain unauthorized access to the Treasury."

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