Every company needs to know "who belongs," and corporate ID cards are becoming de rigueur, even in small and medium sized corporations. Corporate security most often drives identity and card programs, but forward thinking organizations can leverage those efforts for significant additional value.
In the security realm, simple visual identification with an employee's photo clearly displayed on the badge is strong starting point. This can be improved with watermarking and holographic overlays to reduce counterfeiting. Today's state of the art building access systems readily support card access. While use of the magnetic stripe is still common, most new builds opt for the use of prox or contactless smart cards. This increases security and reduces overall wear on the system. Many systems can support a combination of both mag stripe and contactless technologies. More recently, these card applications are combined with video technologies and extensive audit trails to dramatically raise the security level. As the costs and time for card production fall, visitors are often issued cards on the spot, often reading their driver's license or other government issued photo ID. This offers the chance to ìtrackî visitors throughout the facility, with a credential that can be visually and physically expired in a controlled manner.
Other organizations are utilizing their corporate card identity programs for ancillary services traditionally found on university campuses. These include vending, food service, print control, and health services. These offerings expand the service value of your identity programs while driving additional savings or sales. Print control offers a good business case to bridge the divide between physical card deployments and IT applications. Computer printing is one of the largest ìhidden costsî of IT. Print control applications, using your corporate ID, properly allocate costs. Coordination with your IT log on credentials lays the groundwork for advanced IT applications, such as two factor authentication, file encryption and digital signatures.
Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley and other state and federal regulations have raised the pressure on IT for confidentiality, integrity and authentication security. Increasingly organizations realize this is best accomplished with two-factor authentication utilizing your card program. These and other factors, lead more organizations to combine responsibility for both physical and logical security. Card programs are emerging as the provisioning point for both physical and logical identity & access management.
Your corporate identity program and the ID card itself will continue to expand in serviceability and importance. Whether your company uses IDs for building access, network log on, auxiliary services, or simple visual identification, InfinaCard can support your identity program with a full range of products for card production and strategic service offerings for enhancing the value of your corporate identity program.
© 2005 InfinaCard, Inc.