realtime North America, Inc. has announced that its bioLock software has been installed by the Polk County School District in Florida, the U.S.A.  The Polk County School District is using SAP solutions for most of the district’s business processes: HR, Payroll, Finance and Budgeting, Asset Management, Purchasing, Warehousing, Work Orders and Project Systems.  The School District’s policy states that user IDs are not to be shared and passwords are not to be written down and posted on or near workstations, but sometimes it happens anyway.  The primary concern is to protect the user logon to ensure ‘accountability’ for the principal acting as the ‘CEO’ of the individual school.

The school district is using biometric mice as well as keyboards from Cherry Electrical Products to protect the logon to SAP applications for principals and other users with access to critical information.  The technology also enables a well-intentioned “delegation” which ensures the principal’s secretary will be uniquely identified while using the principal’s user ID to SAP applications, if authorized to do so.  In the Procurement area, bioLock will serve as a biometric Segregation of Duty (SoD), among other things, to approve a purchase order requisition release.  bioLock will be used in the HR area for approving the time entry in the payroll system.  In the future, the School District also plans to implement bioLock as “true” electronic signature into specific workflows.

bioLock can restrict the logon to SAP applications (security level I), every transaction (level II), and any fields or info types (level III).  Independent from the user of an SAP solution, bioLock will uniquely identify the “actual user” and log his or her activities in the standard log file.  With this leading identity management solution for SAP solutions, one now has proof who did what and when within the system.  Persons in critical departments such as finance, HR, IT, production, management, and other selected employees handling sensitive data are equipped with bioLock to protect the company from fraud and help them to comply with mandatory regulations.  bioLock will guarantee more accurate audits and will help to comply with critical regulatory mandates such as the California Act, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.  Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires certifying that companies have established and maintained internal controls and will assess and audit their systems’ effectiveness annually.  The latest version of bioLock is compatible with most leading fingerprint readers and laptops with built-in fingerprint scanners such as HP, Dell or Lenovo (IBM). 

The Polk County School District has taken an innovative and proactive approach to protect their confidential data and the privacy of their employees and students to comply with mandatory regulations.