If your office building or facility is like most, people come and go throughout the day. Employees and visitors need quick access to get their jobs done, and your business needs security. So what is the best approach to ensuring secure access without slowing things down?
Most organizations use a variety of traditional methods to secure building access, from security officers to RFID cards, PINs, key badges, and electronic locks. But traditional access control approaches are not meeting increasingly complex and multi-faceted security challenges. Security managers are beginning to explore biometric identification such as fingerprints, voice patterns, and iris recognition—all of which have proven more reliable than passwords or tokens.
Codes and cards are easily lost, forgotten, stolen, or shared. Estimates vary, but simply resetting or replacing passwords and cards can cost between $150 and $200 per employee or customer per year. Badges, pin codes, and even some biometric solutions can impede the free flow of facility access. And clumsy, antiquated, vulnerable, and limited access control systems expose an organization to dangers such as theft or fraud.
Biometric access control—iris recognition in particular—has advanced rapidly in the last few years. Iris recognition is now a secure and fast identification solution.
Speed and Reliability
- Most reliable biometric – Impossible to change and almost as difficult to duplicate, human iris patterns are certain and enduring—more than fingerprints, voice, face, or gait. Human irises are stable from age 3, and each iris has more than 250 points of identification, resulting in one of the lowest false accept rates of any biometric. If two irises are identified the odds of false accept rate is 1 in over 1 trillion.
- Provides more information – Knowing an individual’s identity, where they are in a building, and when they arrived or left is critical for security today. Traditional access control methods may tell you what has happened in the building (i.e., a badge has been swiped or a pin code has been entered into a door lock), but do not provide certainty that the individual associated with the access product is the one in fact using it. Iris biometrics provides reliable information for proactive decision-making to permit, exclude, or observe an individual in real time.
- Improves the speed of security – Users simply glance at an iris-recognition system from a comfortable distance to verify identity and gain access. SRI’s Iris on the Move biometric systems, for example, can identify people in less than a second. Non-contact iris recognition solutions provide the speed of swiping an access card with the unmatched security of biometrics.
In our white paper, “Look This Way: Seeing the Future of Iris Recognition,” we detail how security managers facing diverse access control challenges (enterprise, law enforcement, healthcare, and consumer banking) can leverage iris recognition to enhance security without slowing down the speed your business needs to operate efficiently, securely, and cost effectively.
Market-ready biometric systems from SRI International will be demonstrated at ISC West 2014. Visit SRI booth #2089 to learn more about our award-winning Iris on the Move (IOM) biometric products that combine unprecedented accuracy of iris recognition with quick, convenient solutions for secure access control and identity authentication.