The ups and downs of using biometrics, grid computing and VoIP

IT pros share their experiences at industry conference aboard ship.

Making the move to biometric readers can really simplify password management, though be aware that not all applications will support the technology without extra work

Grid computing can drastically cut the amount of money spent on computer systems. Just don't be fooled into thinking it's a utility.

And using toll bypass as part of a VoIP rollout can knock millions of dollars off telecom costs, but don't expect it to help you in India.

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Making the move to biometric readers can really simplify password management, though be aware that not all applications will support the technology without extra work

Grid computing can drastically cut the amount of money spent on computer systems. Just don't be fooled into thinking it's a utility.

And using toll bypass as part of a VoIP rollout can knock millions of dollars off telecom costs, but don't expect it to help you in India.

Those were some of the lessons learned with new network technologies shared by IT pros with their colleagues at this week's CIO Forum, a unique annual conference hosted on the Norwegian Dawn cruise ship sailing out of New York. IT suppliers foot the bill to have face-time with IT buyers, some 300 of whom attended, according to organizers.

Among them was Craig Brown, vice president of care management technologies at Concentra, who described during a panel discussion the healthcare provider's laptop management and security initiative, which supports some 2,850 people who work in the field, including nurses and sales people. The initiative came about as a result of a number of factors, including laptop procurement issues, the need to comply with regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley and a desire to improve total cost of ownership, a large chunk of which was determined to stem from password management.

Brown says the company sought a system that would be deployable across the company in the form of a single hardware and software image, work in assorted remote access environments, support encryption, include a self-help portal and address disposal of old machines.

The heart of the system is fingerprint reading technology and encryption hardware built in to the company's IBM T series laptops that enables the saving of usernames and passwords to multiple applications, including in-house and third-party programs. Brown says the technology is reliable, with false prints being accepted only one out of 10,000 times.

"The one downside we've seen to this is that if you have the software manage your passwords you don’t know what they are," Brown said. "So if you were to go to another workstation you might not be able to get in."

One big benefit of this system is that passwords can be updated automatically to comply with corporate policies or industry regulations. However, Brown did say 2 of 15 applications didn't support this automation easily. He found that issues arose with homegrown applications that don't necessarily use a common directory such as Microsoft's Active Directory and as a result has tried to migrate more programs to Active Directory.

While that has required extra work, he said help desk tickets are on the decline.

Concentra weighed going with smart cards, but found the biometric system less expensive as a result of so many vendors now building the technology into their standard computers, Brown said.

One thing Brown cautioned fellow IT pros not to overlook is end user training, particularly if you are serving non-technologists. In Concentra's situation, end users are shipped laptops with a software image on them, but still need to input their fingerprint for different applications and get the technique down for moving their finger across the biometric reader.