As the spectre of Y2K fades and corporate IT strategists resume the
process of upgrading infrastructure and enabling e-business, the
challenge of maintaining security in increasingly widely distributed
environments has become important, and given that the increasing mobility
of the workforce means you can't be sure who's really at the other end
of the network link, it's clear that simple user ID and password
logons are no longer sufficient.
In the past, the issue has often been resolved through the adoption of
handheld hardware tokens that provide a one-off, time-limited code to
the login procedure. However, these tokens are also one more thing users
can lose. Sensing an opportunity to simplify access even further,
biometrics vendors are pushing down prices and kicking off corporate
trials intended to make their products the next major standard for user
authentication in corporate IT environments.
