Physical access control technology has remained largely the same through most of its history. A user walks up to a reader, presents a valid access card, and the door opens. Administrators manually entered identities into the access control system, controlling access permissions and roles on the back end. In recent years, while many elements of access control have changed on the front end, back-end operations have, for the most part, remained unchanged.
The emergence of trends such as mobile credentials, hybrid work models, multi-factor authentication, and biometrics have changed the way users gain access to facilities. Administrative and security teams are under intense pressure to keep up — not only with evolving trends, but also with the continuously changing user roles inherent to all businesses. Natural changes within an organization, such as staff turnover, scheduling updates, and limited-term vendor contracts, (often described by identity managers as movers, leavers, joiners) can literally equate to thousands of yearly access changes and inevitably cause a backlog of inaccurate access information. Physical access control systems are ill-equipped to accurately account for these changes as they often operate in isolation from other business systems.
As a result, inaccurate access data is compounded within an access control system — creating an issue which can be called ”access chaos.”
