Passlogix adds support for HID Crescendo Card
26 February, 2008
category: Corporate, Digital ID, Health
A manufacturer of single sign-on solutions has added support for HID Global’s Crescendo cards. Passlogix says the combined features of its v-GO and Cresendo technologies have specific advantages for the health care industry, enabling hospitals to enable secure application sign-on without users having to manually entering their passwords.
ORLANDO, Fla.–Passlogix®, Inc., announced that it has added HID Global’s CrescendoTM combined physical and logical access control cards to the extensive list of strong authenticators supported by the Passlogix v-GO® Sign-On Platform™. Organizations that deploy Crescendo to provide logical and physical access with a single card can now use the same card with v-GO to enable proximity card-based and smart card-based enterprise single sign-on without requiring two separate authentication devices.
The combined capabilities of v-GO and Crescendo have particular benefits in a health care environment. Hospitals and other facilities can implement v-GO to enable fast and secure application sign-on without manual password entry. Crescendo access cards can then be used to provide parking lot, building and department door access; cashless vending; two-factor authentication to the computer network; and single sign-on to both individual and shared workstations through v-GO.
v-GO’s ability to mix and match authentication methods, including the proximity and smart card capabilities of Crescendo, also makes it possible to use different methods with different user groups such as physicians, nurses, pharmacists and accounting personnel based on their needs and preferences.
“Health care enterprises must satisfy the demand for rapid access to clinical information meeting the security requirements of regulatory mandates like HIPAA. These two needs have accelerated adoption of single sign-on and strong authentication technologies in the health care industry,” said Stephane Fymat, Passlogix vice president of strategy and product management. “Our support for HID’s Crescendo card is part of our ongoing effort to offer the broadest possible choice of strong authenticators so that any device rolled out to enhance network logon security can also be used with our v-GO platform.”
“Passlogix’s support for our Crescendo card enables organizations of all kinds to use Crescendo for single sign-on as well as for initial network logon and physical access,” said Phil Scarfo, vice president of Identity and Access Solutions, HID Global. “This advances our strategy of offering a multi-purpose card that simplifies identity-related security solutions by combining HID’s industry-leading proximity technology with an embedded smart chip on a single card platform.”
Product Background
Crescendo is an off-the-shelf smart card that can be easily and cost-effectively deployed for both logical and physical access control and other secure identity-related applications. It provides out-of-the-box, standards-compliant support for thousands of logical access applications, is supplied pre-initialized with the required on-card software as well as required drivers and middleware, and needs no additional per-seat middleware license, significantly reducing lead times and costs.
In addition, Crescendo is designed to work with existing physical access control systems incorporating different types of magnetic stripe, proximity or contactless 13.56 MHz smart card technologies. It supports the Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 (ILM 2007) and the Windows Smart Card Framework; scenarios such as Windows Domain logon, VPN, Microsoft Office Outlook, secure Web access and wireless LAN authentication; and third-party security applications including single sign-on, pre-boot authentication, disk encryption and digital signatures.
The v-GO Sign-On Platform is built around v-GO SSO (v-GO Single Sign-On), a solution that automatically and securely signs the user into enterprise applications after a single network logon without requiring users to remember and manage multiple users IDs and passwords. v-GO SSO and six add-on products offer broad functionality, scalability, rapid wizard-based deployment and low total cost of ownership, with more than 10 million licenses sold to organizations around the world.
v-GO interfaces with Crescendo cards through v-GO AM (v-GO Authentication Manager) and with shared workstations through v-GO SM (v-GO Session Manager), add-on modules that extend v-GO’s single sign-on capabilities to any form of strong authentication and to kiosk environments, respectively.
Other components of the v-GO platform provide the industry-first ability to control shared password access to privileged accounts through the ESSO infrastructure; enable user credentials to be automatically injected into the v-GO database from the leading identity management systems for zero-touch provisioning; permit self-service reset of forgotten Windows passwords; and centralize management of strong authentication devices in any format and from any vendor.
More information and evaluation kits for Crescendo are available at www.hidcorpcom/cresendo. More information about the v-GO Sign-On Platform is available at www.passlogix.com.
