Pandemic Will Spur Biometric Innovation Comparable to Post-9/11 Period: Acuity

“…with so much business going online and virtual, organizations will need to be sure that the people they’re working and interacting with are who they say they are, and that hackers aren’t able to intercept sensitive data.”

“The pandemic experience will fundamentally reshape the way business is conducted on a global scale,” writes renowned industry analyst Maxine Most in a new blog post from Acuity Market Intelligence. The post is Most’s take on the bigger trends that are taking shape as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with digital identity and biometrics poised to play a key role going forward.

That’s because of a continuing boom in teleconferencing and telehealth. This is already as huge numbers of businesses have transitioned to remote work setups in a bid to facilitate the social distancing necessary for mitigating the spread of COVID-19; meanwhile, healthcare organizations are looking to remote care solutions to help manage ballooning inflows of patients, and to protect the most vulnerable from infection.

Maxine Most predicts that these adaptive changes will, to some extent, be permanent as business leaders and administrators recognize the advantages of remote work and conferencing. And that means the matter of digital identity will be paramount: with so much business going online and virtual, organizations will need to be sure that the people they’re working and interacting with are who they say they are, and that hackers aren’t able to intercept sensitive data.

Biometrics will play a key role here, of course – and not just in authentication, but in further aiding the fight against pandemic disease. As Most writes, the technologies in play will “encompass identity biometrics and medical biometrics, where medical biometrics will spawn a new class of sensors deigned to identify any number of critical health related indicators”.

Most goes so far as to compare the coming change to what happened after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which spurred “twenty years of security innovation around identity”. As Most says, the tech world’s response to these kinds of disasters is one of “sober enthusiasm”, in which professionals look for innovative solutions to the new challenges that now present themselves.

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March 30, 2020 – by Alex Perala