Focusing on Biometrics Yet? You May Need to Move Quickly.
Over the last couple years the biometric industry has made tremendous advancements in technology for identity management. Improvements such as accuracy, anti spoofing, live and fake detection, advanced features, interoperability and the steady decrease in cost, will make biometrics the obvious winner in preventing fraud, tracking employee time, replacing passwords, as well as protecting your facility, employees and assets.
In todays environment of clever digital thieves, intellectual property theft, hackers and workplace violence, protecting employees and sensitive data is paramount to business continuity. Biometrics seem to be the obvious choice for an easy cost effective way to advance your security plan and help protect your organization.
With the ability to apply to both logical and physical security applications, such as facility access control, data access with single sign on, identy management, verification, BYOD environments and banking transactions, biometric applications will play an ever expanding role in your security and protection.
If you are a small security company and have been in business for awhile, you most definitley have worked with card reader access control for years, and probably still do. This was the 800 pound gorilla in security for decades and still has a large share of the market. If you are still offering this as your main product line for access control security and have no plan to change this soon, you may have to take a hard look at where your target market will be in a few years.
I am sometimes surprised when I approach a smaller security integrator and discuss biometrics. It seems a sure bet adopting biometric technology today assures business longevity in the very near future. Biometrics will soon be the dominant technology in secure transactions and identity verification as well as facility access control, if not already. It puzzles me when there is very little focus on embracing biometrics in a security integrator's business plan.
My discussions with small security company owners leads me to believe that there are reasons why smaller integrators in some cases have a preference to defer to older card systems and not biometrics. These are a few that I hear often.
"Reliability of biometric technology/ ease of use by the clients/ comfort and experience in selling card systems as a solution/ perception that biometrics are too expensive/ training staff and sales on new technology/ customer enrollment process/ one of the most common reasons given is that they have had a bad experience with cheap or early market biometric readers in the past."
My real life experience has been that when a potential client understands the differences and benefits between the technologies and actually sees a quality biometric device in use, it still has a big WOW factor and they will usually lean towards a better security solution even if it cost a little more. This is where your skills as an expert advisor comes in and the client is relying on you for answers.
It may be a smart business move to prepare for this shift in adopting biometrics now, as opposed to later, so you maintain your competative edge. Selling only card based access control is easier, but will you be able to continue this forever?
How many VCR repair shops have you seen lately?
Contact me if you would like to discuss providing quality biometrics to your clients. I love working with small companies and integrators looking to gain an advantage over their competition.