Biometric Authentication

Biometric identification was seen first in a JamesBond film. The image had been etched in history. Itwas not as mesmerizing as Ursula Andress emerg-ing out of the sea but it had M flashing her fingers to opena secure door. Since then the fingerprinting, facial recogni-tion and retina scanning has been strongly linked with coldsteel doors protecting a chemical that would unleash certaindeath.Far removed from those sci-fi misconceptions is theapplication in business. Though retina scanning might stillbe restricted to labs, fingerprinting isn't, and can can verywell be used by even mid-sized enterprises. Its usage does-n't remain restricted to large enterprises, because the costof deploying the same isn't prohibitive anymore, especiallythe finger print recognition, which comes pre-built in mostlaptops these days. Biometric authentication has manyuses besides logging onto a laptop or a PC. Let's take alook.

Attendance

The most mundane, improbable, and possibly heartbreak-ing, is the use of biometric devices in attendance. While sev-eral big businesses had switched to regulate entry, thepractical use was to replace the dusty old register and pen.The fingerprint marks the ins and outs of the employee thusgiving an accurate reading on the productivity. This can bemuch better than an RFID ID card, because it can't be usedby others.

Security

After26/11, the police have introduced automated finger-print identification system catering to law enforcementagencies for criminal identification and tracking. Facialrecognition is another technology gaining rapid popular-ity that detects & captures facial images without human in-tervention.

Social

With the Nilekani's UID and the NREGA projects completelyon biometric applications of both fingerprinting and retinascanning, other projects too have been gathering impetus.The technology is likely to be used to guard the length andbreadth of the country through E- passports, immigrationcontrol, and implementation at coastal borders.

Healthcare, banking and E-commerece

“Even the healthcare segment is one of the early adopters ofbiometrics for allowing customers to eliminate costly usernames and passwords, protect highly confidential patient in-formation, eliminate identity fraud, and comply with industryregulations,” said Rajiv Bhalla, Country Head, Sales and Mar-keting, NEC India. Banking is another vertical where finger-print or retina scanning can map a customer's data and theconstant need to identify at various points will be removedmaking transactions as paperless as possible. E-commercehas been gradually adopting it by introducing hardware thatcan map out fingerprints.

Trends

“The global market for biometrics core technology is cur-rently valued at $2.58 billion, and this is expected to swell to$11billion by 2017,” said Bhalla. Public safety is no longer aniche market that interests only a few players; it has beencatching up in a big way within mid-size companies. “Thoughthere is some initial cost involved here, however, the returnon investment in the form of security to its consumer is im-mense. This is the reason why more and more mid size com-panies have realized and are increasingly accepting andadopting security solutions,” said Bhalla. With the advent ofIP surveillance into mainstream businesses, biometric solutions will be used for identification of suspicious characters.