Features Opinion
Key Secure Identity Trends for 2015 – Part 2: Banking, Healthcare and Education

All market segments share common technology trends as we move into 2015, but each also faces its own unique challenges. In my last column, I reviewed some of the key technology trends that we believe all segments will face. Now, here are some of the market-specific developments to watch in banking, healthcare and education. 

Banking and financial institutions: 
• There will be an increasingly critical need for physical access solutions that integrate with logical secure identity solutions to protect bank facilities, data and cloud applications. 
• Banks will embrace a “tap in” strong authentication model throughout the physical and IT infrastructure, and consolidate associated tasks as part of a centralized identity and access management system. 
• Biometrics will continue to proliferate throughout the worldwide banking infrastructure, improving physical security and the user experience (ATMs for example).   

Healthcare: 
• Security, information security (IS) and medical staff will all learn the importance of both physical and information security, and how to coordinate and unify workflow and security enhancements. 
• Like enterprises and the federal government, healthcare institutions will converge solutions for security at the door, for data, and in the cloud and deploy a “tap in” strong authentication model using a single, more efficient and economical identity and access management system.   
• Biometrics will help hospitals protect facilities and patient privacy, register patients, manage visitors, process payments, ensure accurate medicine dispensing and eliminate drug diversion, and more.

Education: 
• Campus identities will extend onto smartphones, wearables and other mobile devices, for a growing range of authentication applications. 
• Plastic ID cards won’t go away, but will transition from magnetic stripe (magstripe) and proximity (prox) to high-frequency contactless smart card technology with visual and logical anti-tamper elements for more trustworthy, multi-layered authentication. Issuance speed will improve through strategies like pre-printing card elements and using inline card personalization solutions. 
• Future campus IDs will also incorporate biometrics for improved convenience and security. 
• K-12 administrators will move to universal, mandatory student ID systems that improve safety while streamlining time and attendance, library book check-outs, and other processes. 
• Visitor management will move from manual to automated processes to improve security, visitor trend/pattern analysis, watch-list flagging, and emergency evacuation. 

Selva Selvaratnam is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for HID Global.

April 30, 2015  By Selva Selvaratnam