Security Oxford

The reputation of biometrics in access control has suffered some knocks in the past, but it now undergoing something of a renaissance. However, does the technology still retain overall security as its main selling point, or has the desire to attract intrest form the mainstream market shifted the emphasis towards ease of use?

Biometric technology arrived in the security industry over a decade ago with much funfare. It was billed as an ultra- secure and ultra-reliable access control solution with military levels of precision also meant that, in the eyes of many, it was deemed as too costly and too complicated for general access control duties. Despite this, new types of biometric scanning came to the forefront of access control, and we witnesses a mix of everything from retina scanning to handwriting recognition and voice recognition. The rhetoric was great, but the reality was somewhat different.

The recent re- emergence of biometric technology has been propelled by much higher levels of sophistication and reliability. Biometrics has been adopted in the consumer technology sector to grant access to equipment such as laptops and networks, and economies of scale have subsequently dictated that the cost of the technology will drop down to sccessible levels. At the same time, it has retained the claims of reliability and security, and has slowly begun to increase it’s profile in access control. The Us Goverment may disagree with the biometric naysayers, as it has recently mandated fingerprint biometrics for the majority of its transport infrastructure.

A new approach

Whether it worked or not, biometric technology- in the past- was always sold as a security solution.   It can be argued that today, biometric access has reinvented itself to serve a slightly different purpose. Other types of access control require an individual to carry a card or remember a PIN, but biometric readers revolve around biological data that is unique to an individual. When biometrics was first billed as access control solution, this qniqueness was its major selling point, but today, it harder financial times, it’s the fact that cards don’t have be issed and Pin codes don’t have to be remembered that ticks the boxes.