That same smart card is on track for many more uses. "We are introducing cards that have 500 megabits of memory on them," says Martin McCourt, president for Asia of Luxembourg-based smart card technology provider Gemplus International. "So essentially you've got a hard drive in the card, and one that is secure. You can put a thumbprint in there, photographs, your entire phone book." And even DNA information. The HP system that Des Yee was putting through its paces, which Bulgaria is adopting for its national ID system, has the option of a DNA reader. You swab saliva from inside a person's cheek, put the cotton tip in the reader along with the smart card, and the system will tell you in minutes whether the person is who he says he is.
Only the most security-conscious company will go the DNA route. Of more general interest is the use of the smart card to access employee desktops at home or wherever else they are (not just in any office location, as is the case with Sun Microsystems). Currently, some companies allow employees to access company resources outside the office through the internet and the use of a password system. A smart card, slipped into a reader connected to the PC, makes for added security, since the user will need to physically possess the card and use his password. A third safeguard is a thumbprint reader, making sure the person accessing the company portal is indeed the employee.
You can load the smart card badge with other features, such as an RFID tag. (This tag is a tiny radio transmitter that comes in a variety of forms, including one that can withstand 275 degrees centigrade heat in an oven, used in automotive parts, and another that utilizes conductive ink instead of copper for the antenna.) It will then be possible for the office system to know where an employee is at any given moment, assuming he is wearing his ID badge. This was put in practice in Singapore during the SARS scare in 2003. Through RFID tags, suspected victims of the disease were continuously tracked during their hospital stay, allowing doctors to quarantine everyone who had contact with patients later confirmed to be SARS-positive.
Privacy concerns and cost will probably limit the use of RFID on ID badges to hospitals and high-security environments, but the capacious smart cards may be used widely as laptops, tablets, PDAs, and other mobile devices are allowed access to business applications and confidential company data outside the office. "One of the things I see going forward is that people are going to be more and more mobile," says McCourt. "The challenge for the company is to make certain that whoever is trying to access company resources through the mobile-phone networks, say, is really authorized to do so. So there you can use smart cards to authenticate the user."
2: Enterprise Portals
The move to mobility is supported by the migration of company applications and data to the internet. "We're seeing a lot of companies in Asia investing in an enterprise portal," says Lai Kim Fatt, chief knowledge officer at NCS, the IT services subsidiary of Singapore Telecom. (It was Lai, then CIO of the Singapore government's Defense Science & Technology Agency, who developed the RFID-based monitoring of SARS cases.) A portal typically interfaces with customers, suppliers, and the public, but also stakes out a private intranet area for company executives and employees to access from inside and outside the office.
One building block is broadband, which allows speedy uploading by the company's enterprise portal server of applications and data and equally fast downloading and processing by staff. An indication of how ready Asian businesses are to embrace broadband — and thus migrate to the web — comes from a study by Dutch research firm Telecompaper. As of third quarter 2005, Hong Kong led the rest of Asia in broadband subscribers with 73 percent of all households, followed by South Korea with 67 percent. Penetration rates in Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Australia were in the 31 percent to 55 percent range. Chinese broadband subscriptions (6.6 percent of households) grew 90 percent from third quarter 2004.
Another driver of enterprise portal adoption is the rise of VPN — virtual private network — technologies. Banks and other high-security organizations use dedicated lines for their portals, but many other companies now have the cheaper option of utilizing the public internet. Security is provided by a VPN that either encrypts or encapsulates information before passing it on to the non-secure web, and does other things such as authenticate passwords.
More options are opening up as telecom companies join the fray. BT Group, the U.K. telecom giant, is introducing in Asia a menu of IT services that bypass the public internet altogether for mission-critical applications such as CRM software and data beamed wirelessly to a laptop. Instead, clients use BT's internet protocol (IP) global backbone and those of its partners, minimizing the danger, says the company, of the business getting hit by congestion or disruption on the public internet. And because BT and its partners have fixed-line, mobile, and wireless broadband infrastructure, clients can tap its services using any computing and phone device anywhere and anytime.
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