Securing the access to POS terminals and its applications has become more of a concern for enterprises under the mandate to comply with PCI, SOX or even HIPAA. In an environment where the workstations are being shared between employees, tokens used today can easily be defeated or duplicated, and most of the times use a simple 4 digit pin code. In addition, restaurants, pharmacies, hospitals ... are facing a large turn over and keeping the authentication simple and yet secure is not an easy task.

Self Encrypting Drives

Encryption is used by organizations to mitigate the damage that is caused by data breaches, to comply with privacy and data protection regulations and preserve brand and reputation. It is equally essential to deploy encryption across enterprises and this can be done using many different approaches and strategies.

Internet is now being used by many people around the world and one can contact to any person 100 miles away in a few seconds with the help of e-mails.

With an increase in the Internet users there has also been cases of the user’s identity being used by an illegitimate user to access authorized user’s account on the Internet. This can result into loss of personal information or data to the user.

This unauthenticated access to personal information or data can be avoided by the use of some security device which helps the authorized user to protect his data by the means of authentication and authorization. Authentication and authorization helps the user to be assured that his/her data will be protected from being accessed by an unauthorized user.

Worried about you username and password being hacked and used by some unauthorized user to gain access to your system and perform some transactions? Many of us fear for such incidents and usually tend to keep long passwords so that the hacker would find it difficult to break the password. However if we don’t change our password regularly then at some point of time hacker may get our password.

Password is the first defence against any unauthorized access and have been the most important part of an individual’s login details however they are very annoying as they are required everywhere from a desktop login to bank login. Many of us have so many passwords that we usually forget them or get confused which is the correct password for a particular login. Passwords should be changed on a regular basis to protect your data from unauthorized access. Some people usually repeat their passwords and dont think about the risks involved for password protection.

There are many traditional operating systems which do not support new generation security devices for user identification and user access management. Today new operating systems are coming up which supports different types of devices which are used by people to protect their data.

Biometric recognition techniques are the recent phenomenon which has evolved to protect the users identity and data stored on the machine. Few of these include devices such as Fingerprint, IRIS and Palm scanners, etc. These are considered as the most secured devices and are very difficult to get past through them.

Today laptops have built in fingerprint scanners which scans the finger of the user for giving an access to that user. Operating systems have also been undergoing upgradation process for supporting more and more of such identity access management devices.

Single Sign-On is a way of identification and authorization of users only once and granting the user access to all the applications which are registered for that user. This is a new generation technique which is the safest way for user authentication and authorization.

User can gain an access to all the applications with a Single Sign-On and will not be prompted every time the application needs to be accessed by the user. Single Sign-On technique stores the credentials for the user at the time of registration and uses them at the time of authorization to automatically enter the user details.

With an increase in the number of computer applications and web sites, there are many passwords which needs to be remembered for each application or web site. You need a password to login to the computer, to use some application, to access your account on the social networking sites or to do some financial transaction on the Internet. Passwords help to protect your computer, application, or a web site account from any unauthorized access.

Every enterprise and executive today is concerned about protecting sensitive corporate data whether it is on centralized servers,desktops ,thin clients or on distributed mobile devices. Everyone in business now realizes all electronic devices are vulnerable and when sensitive data is compromised the price an enterprise pays is very high in legal liabilities and government penalties for not being in compliance. This vulnerability and liability  are the reasons the computer security industry is prospering and  billions of dollars are being spent every year by enterprises on a broad spectrum of security solutions to try and stop the compromise of corporate data.

There are increasing number of thefts related to computer data and there is an increase in the number of security mechanisms for protecting the computer data from unauthorized access.

There are many ways of authenticating the users for granting them an access to the computer. Depending on the priority for securing the data there can be one or multiple ways of authenticating the users.

Users are given login-password for authentication. This is the basic form of authenticating the user and has many concerns of login-password being known by the unauthorized user.

Multifactor Authentication makes use of more than one way of authenticating the user. In this technique users are authenticated based not only on the login-password but also some thing else which the user actually possesses such as a smart card or who the user actually is such as a fingerprint or retina scan. Multifactor authentication uses a unique way of identifying a user and granting him/her access to the machine.