An increasing number of organizations are realizing the advantages of a comprehensive, risk-based approach to protecting all of their assets. A unified system that is capable of policy enforcement in a role-based access control manner can bring significant economies of scale, and yield real cost savings and elimination of duplication of efforts. Applying least privilege rules, assets can be protected from all threats both virtual and physical and their usage tracked as appropriate to the risk level identified and business impact probability.

Consolidation of credentials traditionally used for physical and logical access separately can simultaneously greatly increase the degree of confidence in identity verification and enables addition of multiple applications, which reduces total costs. Combined with a converged interoperable platform, essential business workflows like rapid revocation of privileges can be significantly improved as is the capability to correlate events as they occur, resulting in enhanced situational awareness. Auditing and accountability functions benefit from unified, forensic-quality logs that are consistent, thus enabling a high degree of assurance in the veracity of events and non-repudiation of origin for transactions.

Federal, State and local agencies and departments that are required to be in compliance with various mandates, including HSPD-12, FISMA, and NIMS can benefit immediately from the FIPS-201 adherence to specifications manifested in the SNS CRITSEC® solution. Other Critical Infrastructure sectors can also realize substantial value in their compliance efforts, from healthcare and financial services to utilities, transportation, and pharmaceuticals. Overall, the bottom line result is stronger security, true interoperability, and recognizable cost savings.