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GCN Home > 07/31/06 issue

Building the PIV team

HSPD-12 touches more than just IT

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

By October, agencies are supposed to begin issuing Personal Identity Verification smart ID cards. Adoption of an interoperable ID across government under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 should help strengthen authentication for physical and logical access to federal facilities and resources.

But authentication is only one part of the broader, more complex goal of access control.

“Any strong authentication measure we can put in place is one piece of the puzzle,” said Deepak Kanwar, director of product management for SafeNet Inc. of Belcamp, Md., which helps enterprises manage digital identities.

Other pieces of the puzzle include identity and account management, access policy and enforcement, and legal, regulatory and audit requirements.

“This is whole lifecycle management,” Kanwar said. “Unless you have a process in place, you’re not going to have security.”

Because of the need to integrate authentication technologies with policies, access-control projects often come with a high cost and high level of complexity. Stakeholders in the project, in addition to the IT and network security offices, can include:


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