Authentication is one of the three As--authentication, authorization and accountability--for USER administration and control. Though authentication is critical, solving the other two are challenges that ENTERPRISES must address first. It is difficult to administer authorization for access to applications or data in a large organization with tens of thousands of users. This will require significant expenditure to solve and will push biometrics to the back burner in the near term.

One of the knocks against biometrics, especially voice and face recognition, is that the system has high false positives. This means an authorized person is denied access because the system cannot process and match to the database even slight deviations in an individual’s APPEARANCE.

Smart cards and other two-factor solutions have become the accepted form of strong authentication systems. Companies have a significant investment in this TECHNOLOGY, which works close to 100% of the TIME (compared to 90 to 98% with biometrics). This makes biometrics a tough purchase decision. The department of defense just issued its one-millionth smart card--evidence of how entrenched and successful two-factor authentication is. An organization of that size would be hard-pressed to switch to a new technology any time soon.

Authentication is one of the three As--authentication, authorization and accountability--for user administration and control. Though authentication is critical, solving the other two are challenges that enterprises must address first. It is difficult to administer authorization for access to applications or data in a large organization with tens of thousands of users. This will require significant expenditure to solve and will push biometrics to the back burner in the near term.

One of the knocks against biometrics, especially voice and face recognition, is that the system has high false positives. This means an authorized person is denied access because the system cannot process and match to the database even slight deviations in an individual’s appearance.

Smart cards and other two-factor solutions have become the accepted form of strong authentication systems. Companies have a significant investment in this technology, which works close to 100% of the time (compared to 90 to 98% with biometrics). This makes biometrics a tough purchase decision. The department of defense just issued its one-millionth smart card--evidence of how entrenched and successful two-factor authentication is. An organization of that size would be hard-pressed to switch to a new technology any time soon.