The Smart Card Alliance released a new white paper detailing how smart cards are best able to secure IT systems in enterprises and the health care, financial service and transit industries, particularly as enterprises and agencies move to cloud-based IT systems.

Written by the Smart Card Alliance Access Control Council, the paper, entitled “Strong Authentication Using Smart Card Technology for Logical Access,” details how these companies and industries can use smart cards to fill the need for identity management and security.

The white paper discusses the need for authentication beyond the use of a simple username and password combination. It shows how smart cards combined with authentication tokens can provide much greater security protection to an IT system and help meet regulatory requirements.

The paper also looks at identity proofing, options for multi-factor authentication, smart cards within a strong identification platform, the various applications smart cards can support and case studies.

The SCA is offering the white paper as a free download at its website.