A more hybrid workforce that is not permanently based in an office necessitates a new generation of visitor management solutions capable of handling multiple types of visitors to a site, including contractors and employees as well as suppliers, customers, and partners.
Fremont, CA: For many people, the workplace consists of more than one office, building, or facility. Some employees spend their entire workday on the move, whether in the office or out in the field. Regardless, everyone requires one thing in order to gain access to the workplace: an identity and an identity-based credential. Identity is the new perimeter, defining how people gain access to the workplaces and applications required to do their jobs. Organizations of all sizes must learn how to digitally transform identity management and the associated cyber and physical access credentials for the workplace. This necessitates an understanding of the differences between technologies used for authentication and identification, as well as emerging trends in identity management that are here to stay.
Streamlining Access to a Changing Workplace
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The workplace is now a fluid environment that is not bound by a single location or network. Its security perimeter is shifting, and organizations are grappling with numerous challenges in managing access to it. They must learn how to deal with new workplace security challenges, such as trusting and managing visitors, employees, contractors, vendors, and others.
Even before the pandemic altered almost every aspect of people's daily lives, there was a shift in the workplace. The physical perimeter of the workplace was already becoming less important in defining secure workplace access. Identity has emerged as the new – and, in many cases, the only – perimeter. This perimeter must be safeguarded by a new approach to physical identity and access management that integrates both physical and cyber/IT access. There are three foundational areas where this approach must be applied to establish identity management for a secure, safe, and productive workforce:
1) secure visitor management
2) credential management
3) multi-factor authentication
Secure Visitor Management
A more hybrid workforce that is not permanently based in an office necessitates a new generation of visitor management solutions capable of handling multiple types of visitors to a site, including contractors and employees as well as suppliers, customers, and partners.
Pre-registration and automated check-ins and outs that reduce wait times, as well as the ability to customize the visitor experience and security measures while benefiting from automated policy compliance, are all features of today's unified physical identity and access management solutions that improve the visitor experience.
During the global pandemic, these systems were used to welcome visitors back into the workplace, allowing organizations to go touchless with self-service visitor badging kiosks and to automate wellness and other screening questionnaires. Mandatory pop-up questions, for example, can be added to the visitor check-in process to help identify anyone who may require additional screenings, and the system can further mitigate risks by automatically maintaining an auditable trail of activity. The same skills are required of vendors, contractors, and employees. In the event of a COVID-19 (or other) outbreak, organizations can monitor and analyze the activity of everyone on the premises. This makes it easier to retrieve historical visit reports and create a timeline of who was in the workplace, where they were, and when they were there. They also automate and enforce continuing to evolve compliance with visitor access and policy-based registration, ensuring that everyone, across all offices, takes the same safety and security precautions.
