Adding Barriers With cards and passwords having much worse faults from a security perspective, such as being lost, stolen, counterfeited or forgotten, says Favio Righi, more stringent measures along these lines can pose, rather than remove, additional barriers to security. Righi s company, Digital Persona, Redwood City, CA, focuses on fingerprint recognition, which dates back more than 25 years as the first of biometric approaches, and which is one of the least expensive and intrusive of methods. Each fingerprint is unique and cannot be stolen. It is individual and personal, and ensures to the digital world that you are you, Righi says. Objectively speaking, fingerprint patterns are as likely to be repeated as snowflakes.
Fingerprint recognition is also cost-effective.
Changing an employee s password can cost several hundred dollars in lost time and administrative expenses, Righi says. Not every biometric solution fits every security problem, and some companies, such as Keyware Solutions of Woburn, MA, promote a layered approach using card and code systems with biometric technologies. When Danny Chu, managing director of Keyware, works with a new customer, he first audits the hospital s security requirements. Our model fits what we call an enterprise security model. From the time you gain physical access into the healthcare campus with a smart card or a biometric, you need to identify your goals in terms of a biometric solution, Chu says.