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Corporate America Slow to Adopt Biometric Technologies
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August 09, 2004 (Computerworld) -- Biometric authentication technologies, which were expected to be widely adopted following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, are still struggling to gain broad acceptance in corporate America.
Despite the much-touted benefits of technologies such as fingerprint, voice, iris and facial recognition systems, the private sector has been slow to deploy them, mainly because of cost, reliability and standards issues, according to a newly released report from Burton Group.
"Over the next two to three years, biometrics will remain a niche solution in enterprises rather than a technology that is deployed to the masses," the report said. And many users appear to agree.
"I think in time, use of this technology in the private sector will grow," said David Stacy, global IT security director at St. Jude Medical Inc., a $1.9 billion maker of cardiovascular equipment in St. Paul, Minn. "I think a lot of companies are waiting for the prices to come down, and there is a sense among security professionals that these products have not been perfected yet."
Providence Health System in Seattle has examined biometric technology "a bit in the past, somewhat casually," said David Rymal, the company's director of technology. Providence was looking at biometric products primarily as an alternative to the tokens it uses for two-factor authentication for remote users, Rymal said. But "the largest barrier to us has been interoperability, especially since our users are faced with multiple applications, and we haven't made much progress with single sign-on," he explained.
Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group's assessment comes at a time when adoption of biometric technologies has been increasing in the public sector, thanks to programs such as the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (known as US-VISIT), the Transport Workers Identity Card and similar initiatives.
"There was a big bump in interest in these technologies after the terrorist attacks," said Gerry Gable, author of the Burton Group's report.
But so far, that interest has failed to generate even half the predicted uptake of these technologies in the private sector, experts said. In fact, only about one-third of the biometric industry's $719 million in revenue in 2003 came from the private sector, according to the International Biometric Group (IBG) in New York.
The upfront cost of buying and integrating the needed hardware, software and middleware has been one major reason for the slow adoption in the private sector, Gable said.
According to analysts, per-user costs can easily exceed $200 on just the hardware and middleware technologies, depending on the technology.
"While there are security concerns in the private sector, the funding is not there yet" for biometric products, said Donald Fisch, an analyst at IBG. "It will take proven success of the technologies before private-sector businesses deploy."
More work also needs to be done in terms of interoperability with existing enterprise user authentication technologies, analysts said.
Holding Off
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has done some "limited piloting" of biometric devices, but there are no immediate plans to implement them, said Kim Milford, information security manager at the university's department of information technology. Some of the challenges were interoperability, cost and high error rates. "In addition, there's the human challenge [in] helping users to understand the technology and to overcome their concerns about privacy," she said. "Biometric evaluation still seems to be too intrusive to many people."
"Because of the hype after 9/11, people's expectations of the technology far exceeded the reality," said Maxine Most, president of Acuity Market Intelligence in Boulder, Colo. "Biometrics got pulled into the public eye prematurely."
In the long term, though, the stronger identity assurance and user convenience enabled by biometric technologies will drive increased enterprise use, said Tarvinder Sembhi, director of product management at Iridian Technologies Inc., a vendor of iris recognition technologies in Moorestown, N.J.
"We are seeing some early adopters that have deployed iris recognition to ensure that only the right people have the right access" to protected health information, Sembhi said.
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