Page 40 - Security Today, April 2021

Running the Gauntlet Back to work needs to be well and good
By Jeff Nigriny
Not long ago when visiting a colleague’s office, it was protocol to arrive early to run the gauntlet of the visi- tor management check-in that awaited, a process that might gladly be endured now if just for a brief return to some normalcy. Before the pandemic, many visitor management procedures were under scrutiny, with many organizations making visitor management improvements a top-level initiative. As we prepare our back-to-work efforts, visitor management will serve as the front lines for mitigating health risks in offices and facilities.
A TRUST RELATIONSHIP
Let’s take a step back. At its core, identity management helps an organization distin- guish who it knows, while maintaining and improving this knowledge throughout an individual’s affiliation with the organiza- tion. When we make a new employee hire, for example, we use an I-9 or similar process by which we positively identify someone using government-issued identification. Of- ten, background checks are in place to en- sure suitability for the workplace, kickstart- ing a trust relationship rather than forming it organically over months and years.
Just as most organizations do not have the time to establish their employees’ iden- tities and trustworthiness naturally, there is often less time for visitors. This is why visi- tor management is one of the highest-risk activities in a physical security program. The result of visitor management is an organiza- tion’s ability to routinely admit people they know the least about -- visitors who now walk among trusted employees -- as though the visitors were trusted in a similar fashion.
Prior to the pandemic, this risk was be- ing addressed by “high assurance” visitor management systems. These systems work rapidly to establish a visitor’s identity, of- ten before they arrive in the lobby. The day of the visit is preceded by continuous vet- ting and, upon arrival, the system binds a visitor to a high-assurance credential.
That credential allows for tracking of the visitor’s interaction with and passage through the access control systems also used by the employees. High assurance visitor management seeks to elevate iden-
tity management for visitors to mimic the degree of vetting that we already perform for employees. As COVID-19 vaccinations roll out and organizations form their back- to-work plans, the need to balance identity management for employees and visitors has moved to center stage. Here’s why:
The word is suitability, but with a twist. In corporate identity management, suitability historically meant background checks on employees and occasionally visitors. At the most, forward-leaning enterprises and throughout the intelli- gence community, this is augmented with reputational data locally captured from previous interactions with a person and/ or behavioral deviations from a historical reputation baseline.
FAITH IN THE FUTURE
These are the generally accepted ways to gain confidence in suitability. It is often said that trust is faith in future perfor- mance based on past behavior, which is the way our brains are wired to trust. We listen more often to and believe in information that confirms what we want to believe.
Behavioral psychologists know this as confirmation bias. When it comes to mak- ing good security decisions, another aspect of our trust psychology works against us. The Harvard Business Review succinctly captures this in a 2009 article about re- thinking trust: “Once we’ve made a deci-
sion to trust, we tend not to revisit it.” These effects can be seen in our everyday lives right now. Our bias might lead us to be- lieve our friends and families are at a lower risk of actively carrying COVID-19 than a coughing stranger in a store. These natural biases work against our ability to make good and repeatable security decisions, which
challenges our back-to-work initiatives. Organizations will ask their security teams to perform some degree of well- ness checking on understandably anxious employees who just spent a minimum of a year and a half working from home. Em- ployees will scrutinize security programs and back-to-work safety measures. An obvious area where a back-to-work pro- gram might falter is if an organization has different wellness requirements for em- ployees and visitors. High assurance visi- tor management was designed to close the gap between the handling of employees and visitors in ways not seen by most em- ployees. Wellness screening will now put
disparities on full display.
Successful back-to-work initiatives
necessarily include wellness screenings, which are the tip of the spear as we wel- come people back into our spaces. How- ever, not all wellness screening is created equal. Here are five things to consider as you move forward with your back-to-work initiatives. Pay special attention to the ar- eas visible to your employees. Direct ob-
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APRIL 2021 | SECURITY TODAY
VISITOR MANAGEMENT
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