One possible step on the road to converging the physical and IT security functions within an organization is investing in smart cards to secure physical access to a facility as well as logical access to critical systems. But is there a good return on investment (ROI) to do so? There is, according to The ROI Case for Secure Access, which reports the findings of a 53-company survey from IT research firm Datamonitor. The report estimates an annual savings of close to $2.5 million for an enterprise with 2,000 employees (of course thats not including the cost to deploy smart cards in the first place). Savings are realized by, for example, managing PKI certificates through the cards, cutting the number of password-related IT queries, and saving time via faster access to facilities.

The full Datamonitor report is accessible at no charge through SM Online.