There have been many advances in practical biometric technology over the past few years, but most biometrics-based products do not yet live up to the full potential of the industry. How useful biometrics are to you today will largely depend on what kind of application you have in mind: Face recognition biometric systems are starting to make a major impact in the surveillance field. If your job is monitoring 10,000 cameras in a large city, you should be looking seriously at what biometrics can do for you today and over the next few years.

Fingerprint scanning has finally become mainstream-useful for access control to computers and electronic files. Fingerprints make logging on to multiple applications relatively easy, and readers are starting to crop up on laptops, cell phones and PDAs. For now, IT-access biometrics aren’t really having much of a security impact, so the short-term selling point is cost savings and convenience. If you’re in charge of IT for a medium or large-sized enterprise (especially in compliance-intensive industries like government, health care and financial services), you’re likely to find something useful here, and early adopters will get real value. However, the mainstream market for IT biometrics probably won’t arrive until later in the decade, so if your organization is slow to embrace new technologies, you can safely give biometrics a pass for another year or two. Non-fingerprint systems are showing lots of promise, but there are few practical products that use them for corporate IT control today.

Physical access control applications, however, are another matter. Biometric systems continue to struggle to find a niche at access control; using your fingerprint or iris to open a door is a very natural idea, but the details are still just a bit too cumbersome for mainstream use. High-security areas and other niche environments can benefit from iris scanners, fingerprint readers and hand geometry readers today, but most doors and locks are going to remain biometric-free for the foreseeable future.

Read more on the following pages:

Introduction
This page - Conclusion
Page 2 - Pros and cons compared to other authentication solutions
Page 3 - Are biometric systems accurate?
Page 4 - Pros and cons of different biometric solutions

Download full article in PDF format