Partner perspective: BioConnect

The evolving landscape of identity in the modern world

A lot has changed in the past 15 years in terms of technology. At BioConnect, we live in the world of identity, security and biometrics... an industry where growth, adaptability and change are paramount in order to fit into the demands of our technological world today.

In its initial growth phase, the world of security and identity evolved significantly to combat the ever-changing world of fraud, security and terrorism. Airports and schools are investing more heavily in video analytics and access control to secure their facilities and the financial industry is focusing heavily on preventing fraudsters from posing as real customers online with technologies like revolving tokens and location-based logic; Yet, despite all of these significant investments to infrastructure and software, many still predominantly rely on key fobs, cards, passwords and pins to verify people. The issue? These technologies can be can be easily shared, lost or stolen making it one of the weakest links in security... Is there a better way of identifying people?  

Every person on this planet has biological characteristics that make us truly unique - they're called biometrics and consist of features such as fingerprints, eyes, face, voice, the way you walk and the way you talk. It's why at BioConnect we call your biometrics your Rightful Identity.   

After many technological advancements in the last 15 years, the biometrics industry is now comprised of fast, accurate, dynamic and more accessible technologies; As such, people have come to realize that this technology can be adopted across a wide variety of uses cases - not just the traditional high-security government applications. Each person experiences multiple identity verification events throughout their day, every day and without identity assurance, this poses implications on security, fraud, convenience, user experience and insight. For mass adoption to occur, the biometrics industry has had to adapt to the demands of the modern day enterprise by making the technology frictionless.

Think about this from the perspective of higher education. A student lives a very dynamic and mobile life. Every single day, they are constantly running from their dorm, to class, to the dining hall, to the library and back again. Their student ID card is the key to it all. It gives them access to buildings, holds funds for their meals and validates their identity and participation in student life. But how many times have you heard of a student forgetting their card? Losing it? Giving it to a friend to pay for a meal or to get into their dorm...? This happens because the card is not actually the person -- it's not unique and it's disposable. It is inconvenient for the student to constantly have to have their plastic, suspect identity with them at all times, and it also presents many threats to security and insight intelligence within the educational enterprise.   

We recognize that biometric technology requires a balance between privacy and convenience - people have shown a lot of interest in using their rightful identity to get about their everyday lives with the advent of consumer technology like Apple's Touch ID, but at the same time, they don't want to sacrifice their privacy for convenience. Modern biometric technology accounts for this with algorithms. In the enterprise world, we are not interested in storing an actual image of your identity in a database - This being the common reason why users are afraid to adopt the technology. Rather, algorithms are built to be able to read your biometrics and then translate it into an encrypted set of numbers before being entered into a database (more on that here).   

Enterprise-ready biometrics also need to adapt to fit into the existing structure of an enterprise. One type of biometric will not fit all use cases (can't have only fingerprint or only iris etc.) and the deployment needs to be frictionless. That's why we've developed a platform approach to biometrics and partnered with leaders like Genetec -- to integrate biometrics (regardless of the "biometric type") into an existing infrastructure, such as Genetec™ Security Center. This allows for one central system across locations and lets you manage rightful identity, all while experiencing an increase in security and decrease in operational friction.  To learn more about adding biometrics to your existing Security Center platform, please visit us at www.bioconnect.com/Genetec.