Reinventing Smart Cards for the Modern Agile, Connected Enterprise

A lot has changed in the IT industry in the latest years, with the growing adoption of cloud services and overwhelming proliferation of mobile devices driving the digital transformation of many industries. Businesses must become increasingly agile to be able to adapt to new market demands, constant technological innovations and, of course, new device platforms. And yet, PKIs and smart cards aren’t going anywhere soon.

Thanks to the maturity and highly standardized nature of public key infrastructures (and a large number of legacy business applications tied into them), enterprise IT departments continue to rely on the proven technology, but they are feeling an increasing pressure from businesses to modernize the existing processes, support new device platforms, deliver better user experience and, last but not least, reduce the costs and administration efforts needed to manage and support the whole lifecycle of traditional hardware smart cards.

One radical approach to address these needs is to replace physical smart cards with a software-based technology. Software smart cards allow PKI to be implemented in a much more flexible way without costly hardware and logistics. However, finding the right balance between security and convenience is a tough challenge for a vendor.

In this KuppingerCole webinar we are going to talk about:

• New risks and challenges associated with the digital transformation of businesses;
• Complexities of traditional smart card lifecycle management;
• Software-based smart card alternatives – their advantages and possible challenges;
• Strong security of a smart card or convenience of a software token? Why not both?

In the first part of this webinar, Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst at KuppingerCole, will provide an overview of the challenges modern, increasingly open and interconnected enterprises are facing when trying to maintain their traditional smartcard infrastructures and will talk about possible ways to make smartcards more secure, easier to use and to reduce management costs dramatically.

In the second part, Michael Elychev, Product Manager at Indeed Identity, will talk about practical approaches to address these challenges and present the Indeed AirKey Enterprise solution - a completely software-based smart card implementation that can complement or replace traditional physical cards.