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| Pegasus Use of CRYPTOCard's Authentication Tokens Saves Lower Colorado River Authority an Estimated 450 Worker Hours Per Year Pegasus says that its deployment of CRYPTOCard's two-factor authentication tokens has enabled Lower Colorado River Authority to positively identify field workers by phone during the critical "Red Tagging" process – instantly eliminating 60 percent of associated travel time. LCRA estimates this improved efficiency has saved 450 worker hours per year, which represents a project payback time of seven months. With approximately 2.200 employees, Central Texas-based LCRA generates and delivers electricity, provides water supplies and flood protection, and manages the waters of the lower Colorado River basin. LCRA's "Red Tagging" or Lockout/Tagout procedure ensures all equipment at the Fayette Power Project's (FPP) three coal-fired generating units is safely shut down – to prevent accidental release of stored energy – before maintenance staff begin servicing machinery. Prior to utilizing CRYPTOCard's RB-1 pinpad token to authenticate themselves by phone the maintenance staff had to travel to the clearance station and manually sign the Master Control document that lists all the isolated equipment to confirm that all machinery had been correctly shut down. With the FPP spread over many acres, LCRA's research showed that over 60 percent of the time taken to issue Red Tags was due to the travel time between the field and the clearance station. And with over 3000 Red Tags per year split between LCRA's five maintenance crews, each of which contain between 10 and 14 workers, this travel time added up to over 450 hours annually. Today, once a maintenance worker has reviewed the Red Tags, they simply contact the clearance station by radio or phone, switch on CRYPTOCard's RB-1 authentication token and enter their PIN (something only they know). The credit card-style token then generates a random one-time password (something only they have) which is displayed on the token's screen, and the worker can simply read the password to the operations staff at the clearance station to verify their identity. As the password is different for every call, it cannot be utilized by other workers at a later time. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Computing News :: home page |