Building Cloud-based Biometric Services

Over the next few years the amount of biometric data being at the disposal of various agencies and authentication service providers is expected to grow significantly. Such quantities of data require not only enormous amounts of storage but unprecedented processing power as well. To be able to face this future challenges more and more people are looking towards cloud computing, which can address these challenges quite effectively with its seemingly unlimited storage capacity, rapid data distribution and parallel processing capabilities. Since the available literature on how to implement cloud-based biometric services is extremely scarce, this paper capitalizes on the most important challenges encountered during the development work on biometric services, presents the most important standards and recommendations pertaining to biometric services in the cloud and ultimately, elaborates on the potential value of cloud-based biometric solutions by presenting a few existing (commercial) examples. In the final part of the paper, a case study on fingerprint recognition in the cloud and its integration into the e-learning environment Moodle is presented.