Unified Asset Protection

Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By SANDRA KAY MILLER

Within the security industry, there has traditionally been a focus on asset control, but “asset” has become a broader term of late, encompassing not only tangible equipment but also business-critical data like customer databases and intellectual property. Today, organizations are looking for unified solutions to protect all their assets — from an executive's PDA that stores confidential trade data to an entire corporate division that might encompass a research and development center. Assets are now a bigger part of the picture.

Using high-tech methods to protect assets can be costly, especially when multiple and separate systems are employed to cover physical and logical assets. To save money and better manage overall security, organizations have begun integrating both physical and logical asset protection into a single entity. Thanks to this trend, encrypted tokens and fobs have increased in popularity for unified asset security.

Asset protection traditionally has held two separate realms — physical and virtual. There are keys, cards and codes for unlocking doors, gates and cabinets. On the digital side, there are encryption and passwords. Over the last few years, the two have been merging.

For medium to large organizations, the asset management and protection can demand a significant portion of a security and/or IT budget.

One system that provides both physical and virtual asset protection without the possibility of a forgotten password or lost key is biometrics. By employing a unique physical attribute, such as fingerprint, handprint, face or voice recognition, there is no longer the need to carry physical keys or remember passwords.

According to Frost and Sullivan analyst Mark Allen, the biometric market in the United States stood at $527 million dollars in 2004 and was expected to grow to $1.4 billion dollars by 2008.

Showing up in everything from secured entries to PDA authentication, biometrics has been rapidly gaining acceptance in the security marketplace. Biometrics is not a new concept, but advances in technology have made biometrics available to more organizations.

When biometric solutions to protect portable devices such as laptops, PDAs and smart phones were introduced, many organizations were not interested in adding more cost to what many considered an easily replaceable asset. However, industry giant Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, Calif., figuring in the cost of lost productivity and information stored on the device, put an $89,000 price tag on a lost or stolen laptop. Companies realized asset value goes far beyond the cost of tangible and often inexpensive items to include the loss of data. Corporate reputations — a highly intangible asset — were also at stake.

With the need to track both physical and virtual assets to meet the explicit standards for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach Bliley Act, companies are willing to invest in biometric asset protection technologies like those once reserved for the government, military and Fortune 100 companies.

Although the driving factor in biometric adoption has been regulatory compliance, companies who have instituted a biometric solution are finding their overall security posture, including asset protection, has significantly improved. Today, biometrics are showing up in numerous devices such as door locks, safes, mobile devices and financial transaction technologies, thus enabling a multitude of assets to be secured using a single system.

David Jackson, IT manager for the Cumberland Medical Group, installed a biometric authentication system for its computer network to comply with HIPAA, but when he realized how much the system reduced the time spent on access management, he sought out a biometric solution for physical access as well. “I didn't realize how much money we wasted on the actual physical access to our buildings — keys for new employees, lost keys, re-keying locks when people were fired. Biometrics resolved all those issues, in addition to giving us a digital record of when anyone accessed certain areas, such as rooms in which controlled drugs were stored.”

Jackson's biometric implementation did more than just control access to critical data. The theft of physical assets, such as medical equipment, supplies and drugs, was also greatly reduced.

Although the easiest and most popular biometric identity is AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System), iris, retina, face, handprint and voice recognition can also be used for identification.

Frost and Sullivan's market research puts AFIS deployments at 58 percent of the total biometric market. Besides being an affordable solution, AFIS is also easy to deploy. Jackson was able to install his AFIS biometric solution himself.

“Setting up fingerprint recognition was simple thanks to the software wizard that took me through step-by-step,” Jackson says. He was able to set up which hand and finger the system would use for identification. “We scanned the index finger of both left and right hands, so employees would only have to remember which finger to use — either hand would work,” Jackson adds, noting that employees have the option to scan and save all 10 fingers into the system, so it would not matter which digit an employee used on the touch pad.

The process took less than five minutes for each employee, scanning the unique arches, loops, ridges and whorls into a database where the information was stored as an encoded character string.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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