Safe and Secure

• By Ralph C. Jensen
• Mar 01, 2015

Jumping into the security industry was a calculated and well-planned venture for Quantum Secure. In fact, company president and CEO, Ajay Jain, walked a few tradeshows and talked to potential customers before making the leap.

Taking the plunge in 2005, Quantum Secure’s truly disruptive and innovative thinking led them to introduce the industry’s first physical identity and access management (PIAM) platform, along with its SAFE software suite. Symantec Corporation became their first customer in 2007, and the rest is history. Quantum Secure is now known as a leader for managing the physical security identity lifecycle and automating the associated access privileges and processes such as compliance to regulations, on/off-boarding and identity analytics.

“As part of the SAFE software suite, we have created a host of enterprise applications that help automate physical security functions such as physical identity management, role-based access, selfservice access administration, audit and compliance management into a single, web-based interface that is easy to manage and use,” Jain said. “Customers walk away with automated processes from HR to the doors, thereby decreasing the risk posture of the organization and related operational cost.”

To Market with Partnerships

By getting SAFE to the market, Quantum Secure has partnered with many industry leaders in both the physical and logical security space including Tyco, Siemens, Johnson Controls, United Technologies/ Lenel, HID, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, etc. to provide a best-in-class experience in solution deployment and consulting to organizations worldwide.

“Physical security departments are now plugged into the corporate backbone along with their IT counterpart to manage overall risks and compliance disciplines,” Jain said. “They no longer operate in silos, and PIAM is that glue.”

The adoption of the PIAM “glue” is increasing dramatically in the corporate, government and semigovernment world; however, not all dealers, integrators or consultants are plugged in yet. Additionally, the level of SAFE deployment requires hands-on training by professionals who are IT-security savvy with business process re-engineering skills.

Customers that show a need to manage compliance with industry or internal standards have shown a preference to include SAFE. Several large international airports including San Francisco International, Phoenix, Seattle and Toronto’s Pearson International Airport have adopted SAFE to automate their badging process and manage the complexities of complying with TSA and related regulations. With thousands of credentials issued and managed monthly, San Francisco Airport, for example, reported that they reduced processing time by 35 percent in just the first year using the solution, translating to $14 per credential. Many large corporate customers like Oracle, AT&T, Adobe, Symantec, United Health, General Motors and Visa are also reaping benefits from the SAFE software suite. In addition, federal government agencies using SAFE software suite include the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, and the Food & Drug Administration. And, because of its unique recommendations and mandates, the PIAM/SAFE Software value proposition applies to many other vertical markets like financial institutions, health care and oil & gas.

Dealers and integrators have seen this product from the outside looking in but are encouraged to learn more about Quantum Secure and the SAFE software suite. In fact, Quantum Secure reaches out to integrators and dealers at tradeshows, offering webinars and training for interested integrators. They also provide training for sales teams of any interested integrator.

“Early partners were mostly project driven, but now several of those partners are creating new high margin offerings with PIAM,” said Don Campbell, director of product Management at Quantum Secure. “These partners are proactively bringing PIAM’s disruptive innovation to their customer base by examining their long standing security processes and using SAFE to reduce risk and improve efficiencies.”

A Secure Environment for Financial Services

Banks and other financial institutions must maintain a secure environment. In order to do so, regulations, such as Sarbanes Oxley and GLBA, must be met across their physical and IT systems infrastructure. Identities and related-area access has to be managed within the physical and logical security pyramid.

“Physical identity and access management is a cornerstone of any financial institution’s security plan,” Jain said.

The financial institution’s security managers rely on their IT department to custom build pieces of PIAM solution - as a Band-Aid fix. This is an opportunity for dealers and integrators. For an integrator, introducing the SAFE software suite to their customer means introducing automatic processes of managing internal controls and reducing corporate risks.

The software helps reduce time, effort and operating costs relating to the management of identities by automating key functions. For a bank or financial institution, SAFE provides a robust approach in identity life-cycle automation, more transparency in compliance and better understanding of security operations via enhanced reporting.

“SAFE for finance addresses the highly stringent compliance and security needs of the financial market while allowing integration of disparate systems for end-to-end identity management, including advanced visitor identity management functionality and executive-level reporting and analytics,” Jain said.

Exceptional ROI for Sm all to Medium-sized Business (SMB)

Literally, everything technology in the security industry evolves. Software and hardware manufacturers seek to add greater value to their solutions. Customers push to cut costs while striving to reduce risks and SAFE for Secure Cloud PIAM solutions are geared to do exactly that: providing SAFE capabilities and hosted IT infrastructure with partners like Amazon AWS to drive costs down and efficiencies up. Users can be up and running quickly without dedicated software and servers.

SMBs also are able to easily integrate their cloud PIAM solution with human resources, contractor management, training, physical access control and numerous other security systems already in place.

“This is an extremely powerful solution for SMBs,” Jain said. “Cloud-based PIAM solutions deliver exceptional return on investment, further increasing their value by reducing total cost of ownership, over time.”

Managing Growth in Large Enterprise Businesses

Some large businesses have inherent problems of managing growth along with diverse IT and physical security infrastructure. They have typically grown organically and through acquisitions over time, assimilating a variety of identity types and heterogeneous systems infrastructure, business processes and view of corporate risks. They need PIAM glue to bring all processes, systems and regulatory requirements into a common platform.

There also is something else large businesses can take advantage of: predictable insights. Advanced PIAM solutions are geared to provide intelligence about our security processes specifically to better understand risk, early indicators of security compromise and find process inefficiencies where we can cut costs. Predictive intelligence will detect and identify irregular behavior based on set policies and parameters. Once anomalies are detected, security management is able to investigate perceived threats and control outcomes proactively.

Managing Access Privileges in Healthcare

There are numerous reasons that managing access privileges for visitors, contractors and vendors in a hospital setting is challenging. Typically, visitor management is complicated because of facility layout but also because of the population of people in the complex. Hospitals usually consist of numerous buildings on a sprawling campus, and identity management must comply with growing requirements of compliance.

“Fortunately, the growth of intelligent and purpose-built, automated visitor identity management (VIM) software provides a solution to address these challenges,” Jain said. “Integrators should know this is a ready-made solution for healthcare. Centralized VIM solutions can add depth to the hospital’s overall administrative safety and security operations, offering the right access to the right areas for the right length of time.” Few other industries must meet the regulations that healthcare does. Centralized VIM can help ease the pain by automating compliance initiatives to specific standards.

The use of PIAM also is on the rise in the healthcare setting. Integration of PIAM will keep an eye on several driving concerns: controlling access to restricted areas; limiting risks, especially abductions and elopements; and maintaining compliance with HIPAA standards. No one wants to see or hear about abductions from a hospital; however, on average, five infants per year are abducted from U.S. hospitals, and in some cases, despite the use of high-tech security bracelets. More mobile patients determined to be mentally, developmentally or emotionally impaired, or who are addicted to drugs are the types of people who may attempt to elope from a facility.

Incorporating an intelligent, identity-based management solution provides enhanced security by automating verification in addition to screening and badging identities throughout healthcare facilities. Credentials can be incorporated into ID bracelets or other wearable badges, and PIAM provides a reliable platform to manage these policies. Additionally, PIAM will ensure that HIPAA requirements, regarding physical access to sensitive data, will be met to maintain privacy and security of an individuals’ identifiable health information.

Education - A Couple of Mini Case Studies

Johnson Controls, an integrator, installed Quantum Secure’s SAFE identity management system at Roger Williams University. The solution serves as an interface between the P2000 security management systems and the university’s enterprise resource planning system that houses all the information about where students need to be and when.

With SAFE in place, the university saves many man-hours, and now uses that time for other ongoing tasks such as setting up alarm upgrades, securing additional entrances and replacing or re-keying necessary physical lock hardware.

SAFE automates nearly 40 percent of the security operations at Roger Williams University, potentially eliminating as much as 95 percent of the errors associated with manual processing. Cycle time and change requests have also improved.

Similarly, Siemens brought the SAFE solution to Southern Methodist University (SMU) to automate their complex internal identity- and access management-related processes.

The identity management solution also helps SMU maintain and improve internal policies and procedures related to the physical security of all staff, property and assets. Accuracy of access assignments has improved and means that the right people are in certain places at certain times, which improves not only security, but also accountability.

While Quantum Secure started operations working with much larger companies and international airports, the brand is rapidly gaining traction in smaller markets equally. For instance, a smaller airport must meet the same TSA criteria as a much larger international airport. The same policies must be in place. Similarly in the SMB market, the challenges are exactly the same as for the larger businesses. Just the scale is less.

Quantum Secure is a well-known solution in the security industry. Company officials are able to work with a wide spectrum of key players. They are able to communicate with IT security staff and assist in business process reengineering wherever required, and have a desire to help integrators better understand how to be SAFE.

“Today SAFE is managing very large, complex customers where the volume on a daily basis could be over one million identity-related transactions as well as smaller businesses where the volume is under 500 transactions,” Jain said. “It’s the same SAFE software managing both environments; the scale is different but the benefits are the same. SAFE is reducing risks and lowering operating costs.”

This article originally appeared in the March 2015 issue of Security Today.