Gemalto introduces instant badge issuance

June 17, 2008
Solution allows local badge issuance of converged physical and network access cards

Gemalto, a provider of digital security, announced Instant Badge Issuance (IBI), a smart card identity badge creation system that complements Microsoft's Identity and Access solutions and allows enterprises to produce employee IDs locally.

According to the company, in addition to printing graphics and personalizing applications on a magnetic stripe or ISO 14443 compatible contactless chip, IBI works directly with Microsoft Active Directory and Identity Life Cycle Manager (ILM) to load digital certificates directly onto the smart card. The result is a single, converged badge that gives employees access to facilities, networks and applications throughout the enterprise.

"Our latest innovation gives enterprises the flexibility to issue locally with very high security," said Jerome Denis, marketing director for Identity Access Management, Gemalto.

Gemalto said the IBI consists of a smart card badge printer and a provisioning and personalization system that works with ILM. IBI provides ID printing, placement of the Microsoft generated PKI certificates onto the smart card module, and encoding of the contactless chip or magnetic stripe for secure access to facilities and other applications. Graphical design capabilities include photo capture and support for multiple card templates for employees, contractors, visitors and others.

"Being able to personalize badges locally while at the same time have certificates provisioned on them using ILM 2 is a great new option for our customers," said John JG Chirapurath, director, Identity & Access Marketing, Microsoft Corp. "Overall it helps to make deploying a converged badge for both physical and information security more cost-effective and much easier to accomplish."

Company officials also noted that when used with Gemalto .Net smart cards, IBI provides the level of integration for deployment of a secure identity management system because Gemalto .Net smart card technology is supported natively in Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and through the update for the current Microsoft BaseCSP on Windows XP.