BIO-key Provides PortalGuard for Texas Municipality

BIO-key continues to make in-roads with the public sector. The company has now delivered its PortalGuard Identity and Access Management Platform for an unnamed municipality in Texas, where it will help guard against ransomware and other cyberattacks.

The deployment is BIO-key’s first with a city in the state of Texas, and came about through a collaboration with Mejeticks and Intelisys. Mejeticks is an IT consulting firm that operates out of Dallas, while Intelisys is a master agent working on BIO-key’s behalf.

The municipality, meanwhile, cited PortalGuard’s flexibility as a key factor in its procurement decision. In that regard, PortalGuard supports a range of different multi-factor authentication options, including biometric authentication. It also does not force employees to use their own smartphones as a secondary authentication factor. That detail was important to the city, since it minimizes some of the security risks that can come with personal devices, and ensures that people’s personal information is not being shared with the organization.

The city is using PortalGuard to secure the data and the enterprise applications that staff need to use to carry out their jobs. BIO-key noted that cybercriminals have gone after municipalities with greater frequency in the past year, since public facilities like schools, city halls, and police departments often do not have the infrastructure needed to fend off more sophisticated cyberattacks. That makes them vulnerable to ransomware, and an easy target for fraudsters looking to collect a ransom, or for state-sponsored hackers looking to disrupt an opponent.

“As IT security becomes more strategic and critical to an organization’s effectiveness, companies are looking to accelerate deployment of advanced security solutions, while also reducing IT costs and complexity,” said Mejeticks Founder and CEO Robert DeVita. “The PortalGuard solution delivers immediate value to our customers by providing a more secure, predictable, and scalable solution versus other competitive alternatives,”

According to BIO-key, PortalGuard should make the municipality’s security processes easier to manage, and allow the IT team to create custom policies for different risk scenarios. The company has proven to be especially popular with county governments in recent months, and it has already delivered PortalGuard to county clients in South Dakota, Missouri, New Mexico, and New York since the start of 2022.

–

April 13, 2022 – by Eric Weiss