Imprivata®, Inc., the converged authentication and access management company, today announced a partnership with Group 4 Technology (G4Tec), a market leader in the design, manufacture and installation of fully integrated security solutions throughout the world. Under the agreement, the companies will combine Imprivata's award-winning OneSign® appliance platform with G4Tec's Symmetry™ Security Management Systems. The joint solution will enable organizations to easily control access to IT networks using the physical location of the user as a factor for authentication. This approach ensures the protection of company data while also delivering the audit and reporting capabilities necessary to ensure adherence with key security policies.

"Organisations today want to build a complete picture of their security profile, as opposed to having different silos covering IT and physical security separately. Bringing these systems together to provide this single overview of the enterprise's authentication and access security requires far greater interoperability at the infrastructure level," said Omar Hussain, president and CEO of Imprivata. "Through the integration of OneSign and Symmetry, companies can bridge their physical and IT silos, by taking this system-level approach to convergence organisations of all sizes benefit from a stronger, more cohesive enterprise security system."

The joint Imprivata and G4Tec solution, which will be available later this autumn, combines OneSign's non-invasive, appliance-based authentication and access management platform with the Symmetry Access Control and Security Management System from G4Tec. The solution offers a set of powerful integrated capabilities for organisations requiring 360 degrees of authentication and access security.

By integrating these security systems, customers benefit from having one single platform through which they can centrally manage employee access to physical locations, IT networks and applications based on a user's position within the building, organizational role and/or employee or badge status. The joint offering also enables businesses to meet regulatory compliance demands by delivering clear visibility into which employees have accessed what, when, how and from where in order to provide comprehensive audit capabilities.

"Through the integration of OneSign and Symmetry, companies can bridge their physical and IT silos, by taking this system-level approach to convergence organisations of all sizes benefit from a stronger, more cohesive enterprise security system"

"By combining G4Tec Symmetry with Imprivata OneSign, our customers will have a way to centrally manage their policies for both physical and logical access. This capability is critical for organisations handling sensitive data as it lets them prevent users from logging into the computer network or specific applications without having properly signed themselves into a building or specified secure area," said David Ella, CTO at G4Tec. "The Symmetry to OneSign integration also provides the organization with an audit trail combining physical and logical information about who went where, when, and which information they accessed. This is a useful compliance tool for organizations that need to eliminate insider security threats or retain detailed tracking information for audits."

Imprivata OneSign consists of three specific modules-OneSign Authentication Management (AM), which increases network security by replacing network access passwords with strong authentication options; OneSign Single Sign-On (SSO), which quickly and effectively solves password management, security and user access issues; and OneSign Physical/Logical, which integrates network and building access systems to provide a single consolidated user identity. These three modules can be licensed individually or as one complete solution, allowing each organization to adopt the needed level of security as needed-all with a simple license key upgrade.