HID launches employee ID platform that works with badges, tokens and NFC phones

“For the first time, customers will be able to provision and manage credentials over the air with the same ease and simplicity as downloading a song from a cloud-based music service,” says the employee ID giant.

HID Global
HID: System allows users to share digital keys via NFC ‘tap-n-give’ provisioning

HID Global has commercially launched a platform that allows enterprises to issue their employees with a wide range of different types of ID credentials, including virtual credentials stored on NFC phones, ID badges and tokens.

Secure Identity Services “is a comprehensive suite of web-based services that help customers address every aspect of provisioning and managing personalised, secure credentials, both today and in the future,” says HID Global. “This includes managing the daily flow of ID card badge requests and large-volume re-badging projects, combining multiple technology platforms onto one card, and deploying and managing mobile credentials carried on users’ NFC-enabled smartphones.”

“These secure identities can be used to open residential locks, access on-line physical access control readers or NFC-enabled electromechanical locks and log on to PCs,” the company adds. “All management can be performed over-the-air. In the future, users will also be able to make security changes, dynamically, over the air, share digital cards and keys with authorised users via NFC ‘tap-n-give’ provisioning, and generate one-time password soft tokens for network access.”

The service works with traditional badges on plastic cards and tokens as well as NFC phones and also offers key management, anti-counterfeiting, custom graphics and personalisation facilities.

Secure Identity Services is launching with support for HID’s iClass SE credentials on BlackBerry Bold 9930 and the BlackBerry Curve 9370 NFC smartphones from Verizon. The NFC capability is managed by administrators using BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which pushes a credential provisioning and management app to each phone. In the future, HID says, it “plans to expand these mobile services to support a broad range of credentials and NFC smartphone platforms across all major network operators.”

“With our HID Secure Identity Services platform, customers have all the tools for creating, using and managing identities on cards and NFC-enabled smartphones, within a secure access network,” says HID’s Jason Bohrer.  “For the first time, customers will be able to provision and manage credentials over the air with the same ease and simplicity as downloading a song from a cloud-based music service, initially using selected BlackBerry smartphone models, and extending to a wide variety of NFC-enabled smartphones as they become available.”

• HID Global will be presenting an NFC World webinar on ‘NFC in Access Control’ on Thursday 25 October. The hour-long webinar is free to attend — find out more and register to attend here.

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