SECURITY CORNER
SECURING IDENTITY As the adoption of security moves from enterprise to mid-level, secure identity solutions provider HID Global is also charting an aggressive strategy for the smaller cities. BY: APARAJITA CHOUDHURY
aparajita@smechannels.com
W
ith the rising security risks and breaches organisations, be it government or enterprise, are implementing technologically advanced security solutions. The physical security market has been forecast to increase at CAGR of 9% over the next five years, increasing from a value of $55.59 billion in 2013, to reach a total of $85.51 billion by 2018. According to Ranjit Nambiar, Director, IAM, South Asia, HID Global, “Physical security market is worth $600 million which is divided between video surveillance, CCTV, access control, intrusion and fire detection. Video surveillance contributes 40% of the overall market, access control contributes 20%-25%, intrusion would be 5%-6% and the rest is the fire detection.” He further says that physical security market is witnessing growth as access control and security have now started getting integrated within IT infrastructure or the IT backbone of the organization and further says the management of both will soon be moving towards cloud based application. Besides, the identity management is also moving towards cloud. US headquartered HID Global operates in more than a hundred countries. Its parent company is ASSA ABLOY which is a large conglomerate in the door opening solution. HID Global’s enterprise part of the business contributes 60%-65% of the business and SMB contributes 35%-40% of the business. The company considers SMB as a significant part of its business and to address this segment, there is a very strong footprint on the distribution part of the channel business. The national distributors of
HID Global are Westcon and ADI who through their branch operations cater to almost about 20 cities in India and the regional distributors cater to 15-20 cities. So the distribution structure is not only restricted to tier I cities but also to tier II and III cities. HID Global has two types of partners: global and national integrator. National Integrators comprise of 15-20 large companies like Honeywell, Siemens, Tyco, etc; besides there are also 5-6 HID Connect Partners in India for different application. While Honeywell, Lennon, BOSCH are global OEM partners, Indian OEM partners are Matrix, Spectra and Smart-I, whereas Software Workshops and Telematics develops solution around canteen management and applications around vehicle traffic solutions respectively. Overall, HID Global has 1500 channel partners under the distribution structure. In order to empower these channel partners, the company conducts product training, sales training, hands on demo training, certification training program. In terms of margin, physical security industry offers 15-20% margin to channel partners. It has also launched product with respect to its new platform called iCLASS SE readers which are NFC enabled which means that smartphone can be provisioned with the access control data and it can be used instead of a plastic card for the access security, so IP architecture and the SIO (secure Identity Object) based or the NFC enabled smartphone for provisioning of access control and third is the cloud based application for identity management. As Nambiar says, “One of the biggest changes we are preparing for is that, as we move to the next evolution of physical and logical access control,
identity no longer must reside on a plastic card. Instead, it can now become transportable and media-independent, and can be embedded into smartphones and other mobile devices that feature NFC capabilities. In this new environment, mobile access control will complement traditional plastic cards as an additional way to provide identity to individuals. Users can open doors by holding their phones close to a reader so they can “present” the digital key or card inside.” But he also adds that the industry won’t see plastic cards going away anytime soon, though. At the end of the day, the mobile access control infrastructure will augment what already exists for plastic smart cards in the typical physical access control system (PACS). Many organizations will still want their employees to carry traditional cards because they are used as a means of photo identification. In terms of verticals HID Global targets IT/ ITeS, multinational banks and technology companies. In addition, the company also focuses on some of the emerging verticals like airports and metros, oil and gas, energy vertical, power vertical, Indian banks, Indian telecom as large enterprise projects happen in these verticals. HID Global further focuses on IT authentication solutions with the availability of two factor authentication or converge security authentication because Nambiar mentions that this part of the business is small for them in India which is around 7%-8%; whereas secure assurance contributes 30%-35% of the business and the rest is physical access control. It’s also starting to see tremendous growth in sectors such as government, defense and transportation, as well as the power and energy sectors,
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Security corner_Ranjit Nambiar of HID Global.indd 26
23/10/13 9:34 AM