Nymi, with its ultra-secure, Zero Trust Connected Worker Platform, is determined to provide pharmaceutical companies with answers to issues raised by recent surveys that showed that more than 80% of security breaches suffered by corporate IT systems were the result of unintentional, yet avoidable, actions by their workforce
Pharmaceutical companies can have all, or most, of these departments: Research & Development, Clinical Trials, Drug Discovery, New Drug Approval, Post-Approval Research & Monitoring, Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical Distribution, Product Education & Compliance, and Patient Assistance Programs.
And that doesn’t mention the multiple admin facilities the company may have on-site. Most employees will probably need access to more than one secure area when they move between departments for their daily work. The need to constantly provide traditional IDs for access is time-consuming and tedious.
Additionally, most legacy company IT networks are comprised of multiple systems, frequently at separate locations. Workers may be asked to manage multiple strong passwords for different systems, and also present other credentials, such as PINs, ID cards, or fobs.
This wide range of methods puts the onus of maintaining the integrity of the corporate systems on employees. This can put undue pressure and stress on people if they end up somehow being responsible for a system breach.
The Connected Worker-as-a-Service
Nymi’s solution to this is an elegant one: what if the worker only has to authenticate permission to enter the corporate IT infrastructure once? This is possible when a platform assumes the responsibility of ensuring that workers have access to all relevant systems and locations they need to perform their work.
To enable this, Nymi has produced the Nymi BandTM; a workplace wearable that is activated by fingerprint and ECG, and remains ready-to-use with On-Body Detection. The Nymi Band connects people to the Nymi Connected Worker Platform, which essentially integrates the employee with the corporate IT network in one authentication.
This new paradigm for connecting people to their workplace is both more secure for organisations and more convenient for its employees. Continuous authentication delivers Zero Trust principles in a practical manner, while Nymi’s innovative wearable component allows workers to go passwordless, contactless and handsfree.
By deploying the Connected Worker Platform, workers can now connect securely and instantly to all workplace systems at once, whether digital networks or physical environments.
“If you connect the worker as a service, their credentials travel with them, instead of being held centrally. Then you can segment employees correctly under Zero Trust and multi-factor authentication, and it becomes a simpler user experience with very strong security controls,” says Nymi’s CEO, Chris Sullivan.
“You could factor in body detection parameters, such as two-way communications checks or current location checks. You could perform a physiological status by monitoring pulse, temperature, respiration, how many steps they have walked, or whether they are stationary or mobile,” he says.
“But collecting and using all of this information would fall foul of many governments’ data protection laws unless you give people complete control over their information. Employees must agree to their employer collecting the data, agree to how it can be used and, most importantly, be able to delete all personal data in the simplest way possible. This is why Nymi has based its Connected Worker Platform and functionality on the principles of ‘Privacy by Design’.”
The 7 Principles of Privacy by Design
The 7 Foundational Principles of ‘Privacy by Design’ were set down in 2006 by the Information & Privacy Commissioner’s office in Ontario, Canada, and became the future basis for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and a number of other governmental privacy legislation around the world.
The principles are:
- Proactive not Reactive; Preventative not Remedial
- Privacy as the Default Setting
- Privacy Embedded into Design
- Full Functionality – Positive-Sum, not Zero-Sum
- End-to-End Security – Full Lifecycle Protection
- Visibility and Transparency – Keep it Open
- Respect for User Privacy – Keep it User-Centric
What these principles lay out is a methodology whereby user privacy is established as the default. Each of the principles is self-explanatory and provides both employer and employee clear boundaries of rights and obligations. Once this concept becomes embedded across industries, it will create a level playing field for all parties, secure in the knowledge that their digital and physical privacy will be protected.
Nymi is continuing to develop its Connected Worker Platform to make people’s lives safe, secure, and simple in the workplace. Their new “Connected Worker-as-a-Service” category is reducing the current fragmentation of security and user experience by enabling all connections to work activities on one unified platform.
Further details:
To learn more about how the world’s leading companies are deploying Nymi, visit Nymi.com
