The landscape of critical business assets has changed significantly since the first electronic access cards were introduced about 50 years ago. Personal computers and networking did not exist - let alone the Internet, mobile phones, digital pocket cameras, USB drives and gigabit capacity memory chips smaller than a flattened pea. Typewriters themselves held no or little data - you could only read some recently typed text from a then-modern plastic typewriter ribbon cartridge.

Today, electronic computing devices (whose non-electronic predecessors were formerly known as "business machines") are both physical assets to be protected, and generators of information assets that require safeguarding.

According to the White House Cyberspace Policy Review, between 2008 and 2009, American business losses due to cyber attacks had grown to more than $1 trillion of intellectual property. Other sources report that identity fraud ($54 billion in 2009), falsification of information, electronic money theft and reported electronic data breaches (up 33 percent in 2010 to more than 16 million records) are all on the rise. The convenience of card-based payments and electronic transactions (including via mobile phones) fuels an expanding base of targets for attackers. In spite of this trend, the application of strong security measures lags. As an example, in 2009, out of a set of 498 breaches, only six reported that they had either encryption or other strong security features protecting the exposed data. However, physical security requires beefing up, too. In 2009 paper breaches accounted for nearly 26 percent of known breaches.

Thus, many companies are looking to smart cards to provide higher levels of authentication for both physical and logical access to critical information and assets. Although the next paragraph starts off with some comments about the smart card computer chips, this article is not about smart card technology details. Instead, it is a discussion about smart card initiatives, and presents some key aspects of an award-winning smart card project in an attempt to convince you of one thing: now is the time to start examining how an identity assurance and smart card program, based on existing standards and technology, can help you establish the kind of security capabilities that your organization needs.

More than Just a Card