The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology across the pharmaceutical supply chain has allowed for greater visibility and traceability than ever before. By adding connected workers to the picture, organizations unlock the full potential of digital transformation.
Pharmaceutical and other highly regulated industries must have processes in place for employee authentication and data integrity, but what solutions are able to meet the demand of strict regulations without troubling users with convoluted security processes?
With the Nymi BandTM, workers can be part of an organisation’s IoT network. This innovative approach to authentication allows employees to wear their identities in the utmost secure fashion. The Nymi Band facilitates authentication to all technology employees interact with, essentially consolidating multiple credentials into one.
The Nymi Band establishes strong identity assurance through its innovative use of biometrics, On-Body Detection, and presence-awareness, thus creating a digitally empowered user experience that is consistent across applications, systems, and networks. At the same time, this unique design provides improved data integrity for compliance and stronger security through a Zero Trust framework.
The Nymi Connected Worker Platform is an ideal solution for industries that must comply with FDA’s Title 21 CFR Part 11, such as pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers or biotech companies. This regulation requires organisations to implement controls, such as system validations, audit trails, and electronic signatures, into systems that are involved in processing data that FDA rules require them to maintain. In essence, the combination of the platform and wearable technology securely provides users with all the “what’s, why’s, and when’s” of logical and physical access across all operations.
Combining biometric authentication with wearable technology
One company approached Nymi to include the Nymi BandTM in a comprehensive evaluation against a host of traditional biometric authentication technologies, such as fingerprint readers, iris scanners, and other devices.
Nymi’s solution is a new category of technology, one that uses secure passwordless authentication to integrate people with their digital world. The company was required to gain consensus from stakeholders representing different areas, including manufacturing operations, IT, IT security, physical security, quality, health and safety, and HR/Privacy. With collaboration from the company’s global innovation team, Nymi was able to help organise and drive the evaluation process to ensure that all requirements were met within each of these areas.
The company was looking for a biometric solution that could be brought into a variety of highly regulated and challenging manufacturing areas where the users would often be wearing gloves, protective eyewear, and other PPE. The solution would need to integrate with a number of different IT systems, including legacy systems, all whilst allowing the users to keep their hands free. Overall, they required a solution that was simple to use while still providing extremely strong assurance of the user’s identity.
ID assurance and audit
Maintaining strong identity assurance and audit trails was paramount, so the company found that Nymi is uniquely suited for this task because of the unique combination of biometric, continuous, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) into one wearable device.
Unlike traditional solutions, this meant that operators were able to wear the passwordless band into their work areas and didn’t require them to reach under their PPE to retrieve fobs, security cards and other tokens that could serve as a 2nd factor of identity to their passwords.
This solution proved to be a huge time saver, especially for a company with more than 2000 employees who were being authenticated up to 100 times per day. Workers were able to optimise their time, unencumbered by repetitive or distracting tasks such as stopping to enter passwords for logical or physical access.
Over the course of the evaluation, the collaboration between Nymi and the pharmaceutical company was mutually beneficial; the company found a biometric and MFA solution that suited all of their requirements, and Nymi learned more about how to transparently communicate with customers about how their technology handles user privacy.
In partnership with the pharmaceutical company’s innovation, IT, security, and manufacturing teams, Nymi was able to develop a training and education programme to ensure that users understood how their privacy is being protected while digitally empowering them as a connected workforce.
