Bond with Biometric Screening

When we go online, we usually gain access to our private folders through user IDs and passwords. Not only are these tools hard to manage, their security is also a cause of unease. IDs and passwords can be forgotten, hacked by experts, devices can be stolen or tampered with. Many of us find ourselves juggling numerous passwords and it becomes a tough job to remember all of them. Some people write their passwords on paper, maintain a book or save them on desktops. These methods are simply a threat to security of our data. We have reached a stage where we need alternatives to passwords so that we can keep our data safe and sound. Technology has made it possible for us to do just that in the form of biometrics.

“Biometric technology may not prevent hardware theft, but it can prevent data theft”, says Jim Wayman, a biometrics expert and professor at San Jose State University. Information is a valuable asset to the technology crazed society of ours and that’s why, its security is of utmost importance and cannot be overlooked. There are several ways to keep the data secure. The data center staffs who manage all the host systems to ensure continued availability and effective operations use biometric screening as one of their security tools. A biometric or biometric identifier is a precise measurement of a physical characteristic of an individual. When such characteristics are captured in a database, it can be used to authenticate the identity or check against other entries in the database. The best known and the most common biometric identifier is the fingerprint. But there are others like facial recognition and iris and retina scans. Biometric screening continually reviews and refines security operations to keep data safe.

Biometric systems are the strongest amongst all other securities. It can be asserted so, as they authorize users on the basis of a physical characteristic that doesn’t change during a life span, such as a fingerprint, hand or face geometry, retina or iris characteristics.

The virtual world has become an unstable and an unpredictable terrain. This has led to a rise in higher logical security measures in the form of enhanced security software and applications. However such applications are not always reliable, and that’s why biometrics are gaining a major foothold in every place which is prone to security threats.  Businesses are now starting to pay more attention to the security measures and protocols of their organisation. Biometric surveillance has now reached a new level, where behavioural characteristic like a gait (a person’s style of walking) is also incorporated in the database.

Another kind of behavioural biometrics is based on affective computing. Affective computing involves computers that are acquainted with person’s emotional state. They are based on a scrutiny of their facial expressions, how fast they are breathing, the tone and pitch of their voice, their bearing, and other behavioural qualities. This might be used for instance to see if a person is acting “suspicious” (acting sneakily, “anxious” or “annoyed” facial expressions,) which  might indicate their state of mind in that particular moment. The latest technology in biometrics is 3D biometrics. The device is proficient in visually identifying a person as effortlessly as humans identify each other. The identification process takes less than a second. When one walks or even runs past, even a plain glance at the device will recognise the person and will commit it to memory. Contrasting with the other biometrics, the 3D face doesn’t require direct physical contact or literal positioning in front of the recognition device. The 3D identifies physical movement of people regardless of their age or height.

This device is equipped with a 3D vision system, which retains information in the form of the unique three-dimensional shape of the face and body. Different from human vision, the device is able to distinguish nuanced geometry with precision of up to fractions of a millimetre. This enables it to differentiate between identical twins as and making the 3D biometrics slightly trendy and reliable.

Realising the importance of biometrics, data centers are aiming to provide a secure and cost-effective software data management solution. With this, companies can boost their operational efficiency, and profitability. The performance of biometric technology has enabled companies to forget the stress of having to set up and maintain the IT infrastructure, support services and security required to keep their systems operating at high efficiency.

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