By Chris Burton, executive vice president of strategy at Sign In Solutions
Government contracting firms are magnets for visitors. On any given day, they might attract contract workers, current and prospective customers and partners, government officials, foreign nationals, subcontractors, interns, visiting students, maintenance workers, job applicants, vendors and suppliers.
These visitors have one thing in common: They all want some form of access, be it to your physical facilities, your digital infrastructure or data, your ideas, your products and services, or your people. And to varying degrees depending on their profiles and the type of access they seek, they all present risk—to your physical facilities and the people inside them, your intellectual property, your compliance posture, your brand reputation and ultimately, your standing in a highly competitive business landscape.
Managing all these risks is a complex undertaking that requires a sophisticated, multifaceted approach. In short, it requires strong access intelligence.
What does strong access intelligence entail in the context of organizational security, and what does it look like in practice? These are questions government contracting firms and their security and IT decision-makers should be contemplating, especially as physical and cyber threats loom ever larger over their businesses.
Who Needs Access Intelligence?
Because they handle highly sensitive information and intellectual property and because they operate in a compliance-focused environment, government contractors face a unique set of security, compliance and risk management demands. Access intelligence is how they meet those demands. A high level of access intelligence is a must for:
• Highly regulated environments, where visibility gaps can create compliance risk and audit exposure.
• Operationally complex facilities, including multi-site operations where layered roles strain access oversight.
• High-traffic environments, where the volume of visitors can expose vulnerabilities in manual processes
• High-value interactions in which the quality of the experience an organization provides to a client, regulator, auditor or other valued visitor shapes how they perceive the organization behind it.
• The modern workplace, where distributed work creates governance complexity that traditional workplace systems struggle to manage.
• High-trust, high-stakes settings, where verified access and total accountability are non-negotiable.
Access intelligence enables organizations to fulfill their duty to protect facilities and infrastructure and the people who occupy them from bad actors. They know exactly who is seeking access to—and who’s on-site or engaged with—their physical facilities and digital infrastructure at any given time, why and for how long. But there’s much more to it than that. Strong access intelligence entails strength in multiple overlapping areas, including:
- Physical identity and access management. Managing who can enter specific physical locations.
- Governance, risk and compliance, or GRC. Managing risk and meeting regulatory requirements and safety standards with centrally governed tools and approaches.
- Visitor management. Tracking and managing physical and virtual interactions, with an emphasis on curated, personalized visitor experiences.
- Digital employee experience. The digital touchpoints and interactions employees have within the workplace.
- Workplace experience applications. Tools designed to improve the daily utility and feel of the office environment.
- Integrated workplace management systems. Broad software used for real estate, facility and space management.
Access Intelligence in Action
Instead of trying to manage these critical disciplines with disparate, siloed systems, an approach that invites gaps, blind spots and risk, the most direct route to gaining access intelligence is by converging them within a single ecosystem. This creates a dynamic layer across the organization to house all things security-, compliance- and risk management-related. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
• Flexibility, scalability and customization. Organizations can scale, flex and tailor policies to specific locations, zones and individual risk profiles, whether a company operates one facility or 10.
• Closing security gaps. Risk lives in the gaps between physical and cyber security, where weak measures in one of those domains can elevate risk in the other domain—subpar network security enabling a bad actor to access and disable physical security systems to cause chaos, for example. By connecting the two domains in one environment, security and compliance teams gain a converged 360° view of the digital and physical identities of people entering their buildings and/or accessing their digital infrastructure.
• GRC made easy. Instead of scrambling to find, collect and verify data across multiple systems and spreadsheets, that dynamic layer provides a single source of trusted information for confirming compliance with safety, legal and industry regulations like CMMC and FAR. It also simplifies and speeds audit preparation.
• Next-level visitor management. A big part of access intelligence is being able to screen, verify and welcome every visitor and manage the entire lifecycle from invitation through sign-out. That includes prescreening visitors against watchlists and threat intelligence databases (with the help of AI) and real-time access decisioning, where a visitor’s identity, clearance level and risk are verified at the point of entry.
• On-point emergency response and evacuation support. With a system that can provide live visitor lists, emergency notifications and communications, and real-time headcounts during an incident, organizations are well prepared to respond rapidly and execute emergency procedures when the stakes are highest.
• Visitor experiences with a white glove, not a heavy hand. By gathering enough information about a visitor and their upcoming visit, organizations gain a fuller picture of the people they’re expecting. That in turn enables them to create curated journeys with personalized flourishes like a prebooked parking space or custom coffee orders for an incoming group. Visitors feel expected, not inspected.
When all these elements come together into a coherent whole, government contracting organizations can be confident they’ll have the access intelligence to not only fulfill their security, compliance and risk management responsibilities, but also to provide the elevated experiences that set an organization apart for all the right reasons.
