Under the agreement, the companies will combine Imprivata’s OneSign appliance platform with G4Tec’s Symmetry Security Management Systems.
A statement said: “This approach ensures the protection of company data while also delivering the audit and reporting capabilities necessary to ensure adherence with key security policies.
“By integrating these security systems, customers benefit from having one single platform through which they can centrally manage employee access to physical locations, IT networks and applications based on a user’s position within the building, organizational role and/or employee or badge status.
“The joint offering also enables businesses to meet regulatory compliance demands by delivering clear visibility into which employees have accessed what, when, how and from where in order to provide comprehensive audit capabilities.”
Consolidated benefits
David Ella, CTO at G4Tec, said: “For some years companies have said that they could provide integrated systems, but this one actually prevents you from logging on unless you have physically entered the allocated location. It also provides the single sign-on element, which gives you an extra benefit.
“Physically where you are can be brought into the equation, so you can have certain security levels depending on where in a building or organisation an individual is.
“And because it can provide a consolidated audit trail, there’s been a lot of interest from places like utilities, health services, pharmaceutical companies – wherever an audit trail is required.
“Most companies have more logins than people, so this can also help to keep track of these as well.
“It’s mainly for larger multi-site organisations, though we expect mide-size organisations will find it interesting as well.”
Complete security profile
Omar Hussein, president and CEO of Imprivata, said: “Organisations today want to build a complete picture of their security profile, as opposed to having different silos covering IT and physical security separately. Bringing these systems together to provide this single overview of the enterprise’s authentication and access security requires far greater interoperability at the infrastructure level.
“Through the integration of OneSign and Symmetry, companies can bridge their physical and IT silos, by taking this system-level approach to convergence organisations of all sizes benefit from a stronger, more cohesive enterprise security system.”
Ella said two of the Symmetry Systems with OnSign integration had been sold so far.
“One is a power generation company in the US, and the other is a military project in Saudi Arabia,” he said.
“It has been very warmly received – and is perhaps timely in the wake of the recent government data loss issues in the UK.”
