In March, Quantum Secure, one of the leading providers of physical identity and access management software, was acquired by HID Global, a worldwide leader in secure identity solutions. Just five months later, the acquisition has helped the company broaden its offering to their customers.
Rochelle Thompson, Quantum Secure’s senior director of corporate marketing, said that physical identity and access management was really a “key piece of the identity puzzle” for HID to continue to build out their product portfolio.
“The end goal is truly securing the identity from the moment it first enters a system through the end of its lifecycle and giving you actionable intelligence along the way,” she added. “With the HID family, I think we’re really going to see this ecosystem of solutions offered which again, focuses on that customer-centric approach, that’s our end goal.”
While cybersecurity and mitigating insider threats has become a major concern for many organizations, Thompson said that Quantum Secure is helping businesses take a step back to realize that the physical component of their security program and who they are granting access rights to is just as important as trying to implement policies, procedures and technology to thwart state-sponsored hacking attempts.
“You have to understand who you’re provisioning access to, for how long and who approved it and what process was in place,” explained Thompson. “Once you get those identities on-boarded, you’re looking at employee data; you’re looking at your contractor data – now what? There are constant feeds of way too many bits and bytes of data from all of these systems. How do you know what to look for and how do you know what anomalies bubble to the surface to take a deeper look at? That’s really what our predictive analytics is doing and we’re actually live with a few customers where we are constantly applying new algorithms to the data and finding ways to improve our predictive solution.”
Although she says there is still some “evangelizing” to do in terms of articulating the value proposition of physical identity and access management (PIAM) solutions, Thompson believes that more people now recognize the need for them in enterprise access control environments.
“Security has to do more with less. They’re given less and less in their budget every year and they have to secure the perimeter, but they are also being looked upon to provide additional intelligence and to work with other departments and they can’t do that when they sit siloed,” she said. “The pain is there, they recognize the pain and they are reaching out more actively.”
“People are stepping into this world for two reasons; one is, I think, controlling costs. They’re stepping in because they can streamline and automate and do more with the budget they have. Second, is that becomes a platform for transforming their security business and becoming more responsive towards those end customers and providing new services to their organizations that they couldn’t provide very well before,” added Don Campbell, Director of product management.
