Page 26 - Campus Security & Life Safety, May/June 2021

"A PIAM system cuts through the complexity and makes it easy to quickly adapt your corporate security policies on the fly, without getting bogged down in bureaucracy."
By Sharon Jung
Streamline Your Security Process
How a PIAM system can help your campus enforce security policies while improving the flow of people within your facility
Trusted Identity
Tyler Olson/Shutterstock.com
Campus security has become more complex over the last decade. This makes it challenging to respond effectively when faced with new and unpredictable circumstances, like a global pandemic.
In the past year, COVID-19 has upended many of the rou- tines and procedures we used to rely on, and campus administrators have found themselves having to adjust to an ever-changing list of requirements to meet new security needs.
It can be a time-consuming, bottleneck-prone process to change access permissions for many users, especially in the event of temporary restric- tions, requiring administrators to change them all again soon afterward.
A simple solution to streamline this process is to upgrade to a Physical Identity Access Management (PIAM) system, which auto- mates access rights. A PIAM system cuts through the complexity and
makes it easy to quickly adapt your corporate security policies on the fly, without getting bogged down in bureaucracy.
The key is attribute-based provisioning, which allows security teams to define access based on a clear set of parameters, such as employee or student status, location or role. It is easier than you might think to implement, and can be done with off-the-shelf solu- tions that sync with your existing policies, procedures, and databases.
Reduce Administrative Overhead
Many access control systems rely on supervisor or security personnel to manually create and update cardholder groups. This isn’t a big deal when you’re onboarding one employee or updating one person’s pro- file. But when you’re onboarding hundreds of new students, restrict- ing access to many furloughed employees, or updating the location profiles of a large cohort moving from one building to another, the
26 campuslifesecurity.com | MAY/JUNE 2021