Verizon Business to provide HSPD-12 solution to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
By L. Samuel Pfeifle
Updated Thu May 22, 2008
BASKING RIDGE, N.J.--Verizon Business, which largely got into the identity management business last year with the purchase of Cybertrust, has been awarded a $6.1 million contract for identity credentialing with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Verizon has described it as "one of the largest deployments of identity credentialing to date" under HSPD-12, a presidential directive that mandates federal agencies and their contractors consolidate physical and logical access control onto one smart card with one vetting process and biometric authentication.
Under the contract, Verizon Business will host and manage the issuance of up to 500,000 smart cards to government employees and contractors at a secure Verizon Business data center.
However, "the importance of the integrator role cannot be minimized," said Tom Greco, director of identity and access management services with Verizon Business. "There's still a lot of activity that takes place on the customer premise. We have our skill set, but there's still a need for a sophisticated integrator to manage deployment."
To be successful in the HSPD-12 space, Greco said, "the system integrators in the physical access space need to get up to speed on changes that are going to be coming down from the federal government" about the way identity is converging. "There's an opportunity," he said, "to be part of the change from a siloed approach to a networked approach to physical access control."
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