A critical issue for security officers today is how to make sure temporary or permanent employees are removed from the employee directory system when they are no longer working for the company. This situation arises especially in large enterprises, which may have different Physical Access Control Systems (PACS) supporting different offices or company operations. It is not uncommon for a company to make an acquisition and have two or more incompatible PACS systems. The simple way to address this is to issue a separate card to the employee to support a different PACS system. While this might be slightly inconvenient for the worker, it is often a simple solution that many companies use. Updating employee information, must be done on each system separately and often manually
There are several problems with this solution. There is no central control of identities and they can exist in multiple locations of a company. Updating employee information, for example increasing access to reflect an employee’s new responsibilities, must be done on each system separately and often manually. Unless the company has a strong procedure to support this, the records outside of the main system, may not be updated and errors can occur. This may not be a significant problem if an employee is working for the company, but, if the employee is terminated, he or she may continue to have access to company facilities and systems, potentially compromising security.