Item: HID DigitalPersona
Rating: 8
Author: Christopher McCarthy

Overall Satisfaction with HID DigitalPersona (formerly Crossmatch)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In today's ever security conscious world we have too many usernames and passwords to manage. Our IT department wanted help the users in our organization stay secure. As many users without a security management system would just write down their passwords near their workstation, save a text document, or a spreadsheet, we knew we needed to provide an easy solution. We offered DigitalPersona to most of our organization, those that manage lots of logins and those that move around the organization often. This provided two solutions to us: One, eliminating unsecure password lists. Two, allowing faster processing of credentials via biometrics for those that enter passwords often.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy for our users to register their fingerprints without IT hand holding. (Sorry for the pun).
Fingerprint accuracy. We have never had any issues with accuracy.
Some use the password manager without the biometrics as it is fully functional password manager without the authentication piece.

Cons

I wish there was a way for DigitalPersona to recognize when a webpage has changed a header. As it works now if a login page address or header changes then DP doesn't know you have a saved password for the site. This requires editing the current entry or creating a new one.
Not sure if this has been fixed in the most recent version, but we have had issues with deleting AD accounts before deleting the license and fingerprints associated with it. This resulted in the license being tied to a user no longer employed and no way to remove it without technical support.
The newest version is slow to open the password manager.

Return on Investment

Increased security for entire organization.
Ease of security management for users of multiple credentials.
I wouldn't say we have seen a direct ROI but we have seen value in the purchase.

Alternatives Considered

various

I don't recall the other products that we looked at when shopping, but we selected DigitalPersona for the suite of tools at a compelling price point. Having a robust solution that has met our needs was solution enough for us. It is not perfect but we have not found a better product that met our needs and budget.

Likelihood to Recommend

We have a few users start with DigitalPersona and then stop using it. The cases generally involved 1 or 2 things. One, dry skin or smooth fingers have caused some problems with the readers detecting the user's finger print. When the reader became hard to use the user stopped using it. Two, users didn't need to login to a variety of systems. Users that don't enter credentials throughout the day didn't find much value in the system since they generally logged on in the morning and after lunch and that was all.

Comments

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Hands on review of DigitalPersona