Companies having PKI in place frequently use time attendance and access control systems. Unfortunately to employees and administrators, it is of common practice when users simultaneously have several devices: a card with an RFID tag to access doors and turn gates and a smart card or USB-token to authenticate in a corporate network. The stated process is overcomplicated and unhandy because employees have to bring along many devices while system administrators have to manage them. You may mistakenly think that the root of the problem is Public Key Infrastructure. But before blaming PKI for ineffectiveness and terrible user experience, ask yourself if you are still using a legacy card management system. For it can be the real ‘enemy.’
In fact, if you deploy a new-era CMS, you can increase PKI efficiency and provide the best practices to cost-effective and user-friendly PKI usage. Also, you can replace multiple cards with one. A hybrid smart card contains an RFID tag and a chip which can be used for physical and logical access. When such cards are integrated with CMS and smart card printer, infrastructure administrators can issue the required certificates, personalize a card (for example, print employee’s photo and position, company logo, etc), save the RFID tag in the CMS database and connect it to a user. Notably, smart cards can be simultaneously issued to several users at the same time. Yes, it’s that easy.
If you want to make the most out of PKI, take a look at another interesting scenario – pass-through authentication in corporate applications. Within one operation certificates from corporate CA and special authenticator are written to a smart card. The mentioned authenticator provides a user with single sign-on access to web and desktop applications. What is more, the time spent on registration of new employees’ smart cards is significantly reduced.
All the mentioned features can be performed by Axidian CertiFlow, a modern card management system for fastly developing enterprises. So if you want to see the future of PKI now and for free, let us know which scenario interests you most and we will show it to you in a real-time demonstration.
