The magnetic card to enter office and log on to your work may soon be a thing of the past. A security identity company conducted a pilot project, which shows it is now possible to enter your office and log on using a smartphone.
The pilot project was conducted by HID Global along with two companies based in the USA.
During the study, digital keys on the smartphones with Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities were used to emulate user credentials by showing the handsets instead of separate cards.
The results showed that the application of a smartphone as a login device was convenient to 90 per cent of the respondents who took part in the study.
Besides the obvious ease of use, the innovation also attracted the attention of firms as provides an additional layer of security for people entering the office premises. The user would have a separate level of security set up for the phone which automatically adds an additional layer to the companies’ security.
The study also looked at providing over air access keys to employees which would be useful in running cloud based enterprise solutions. With the help of additional keys, access to conference rooms and offices could also be controlled and monitored by the company, HID Global group said.
Further, a research into the technology by HID would include ‘always on’ experiences in which the user would not have to start an application to log in, instead could just present the phone to the reader machine.
Ways to avoid excessive battery drain and tweaks to the user interface are also being further researched in the project.