The creation of PIAM (Physical Identity and Access Management) software solutions has been a game-changer for improving physical security workflows. Organizations using manual, labor-intensive identity, badging, and access management processes get the most benefit from PIAM (also called Workforce Identity and Access Management (WFIAM)). However, as both the workforce and workplace evolve (given the dynamic nature of businesses, pandemic, cyber threats, etc.) organizations also need a better way to scale their PIAM operations for physical security. Today, the best way to solve the challenges related to PIAM and physical access compliance is by leveraging data-driven automation. That’s why Vector Flow re-invented PIAM in 2021.

Here are the top 3 reasons why Vector Flow’s automated PIAM is superior to legacy PIAM solutions:

1. It Provides Real-Time Visibility: By leveraging AI-driven identity insights, organizations can analyze all identity data (e.g.: badges, roles, access assignments, access usage, occupancy, vaccination status) from diverse identities, HR, and physical security systems. Brought together, this information provides enterprise-wide visibility to all identities (employees, contractors, vendors, “badge only personnel”, visitors, etc.) and their physical access across the entire organization. In addition to enterprise-wide visibility, automated PIAM provides security and risk professionals with real-time insights into low, medium, and high-risk physical access at scale. Legacy PIAM solutions do not leverage data insights from existing systems, so they can take 1 to 3 years to deploy – causing headaches for customers. Moreover, legacy PIAM utilizes batch processing techniques (that were cool in 2009) thereby making decisions either too slowly or too often, incorrectly as they were not able to absorb identity/card/usage changes in real-time. In addition, legacy PIAM uses very complex approaches to implement role-based access control (RBAC) to manage physical access permissions. The effectiveness of this approach erodes because roles are very cumbersome to define especially in physical security and RBAC consistently leads to over-provisioning of physical access – giving unnecessary access to people who don’t need it – resulting in an increased physical risk surface.

2. It Provides Data-Driven Recommendations: Vector Flow not only leverages data but also provides DIY studios to expedite deployment while working with existing identity data sources, and all identity data types, to develop a complete view of the physical access landscape. Vector Flow’s uniquely developed AI analyzes all identity data from PACS, IT/IAM, Azure/Active Directory, HR Systems, Time Keeping, POS, Privacy, and other data governance systems. By analyzing tens of millions of data points quickly, Vector Flow predicts and recommends physical access rights based on the physical access activity of a cardholder’s peer groups and identity/card attributes to guide the user on whether access should be granted or removed. Again, an automated approach is unlike traditional “legacy PIAM” solutions that are still very process-driven and based on static rules, roles, and batch data processing.

• It Ensures Transparent AI: Vector Flow’s AI recommendations are based on full transparency, providing teams with a simple explanation of why a recommendation for physical access audit or physical access request was made or how and why identity confidence scores have been determined. The visual presentation of the low, medium, and high-risk confidence scores explains the decisions including key risk indicators that were met, demonstrating the logic behind the decisions, and showing the criteria that went into the decision. Vector Flow’s AI brings PIAM transformation at scale to back security decisions with trustful and explainable recommendations.

There’s no need to wait: the automated future is here. Even as organizations face dynamic business challenges such as Return to Work, they now have at their disposal a dynamic solution to meet and simplify these issues. Physical Security teams can now do more with fewer resources using data-driven automation. They have full visibility into, and automated assistance with remediating over-assigned physical access, abnormal access, orphaned cards, and clone cards, and stopping the physical access assignment creep. Physical Security teams can automate existing processes and investments. More importantly, risks are proactively identified and context is provided for actionable decision-making.

With this type of automated approach, physical security teams can help their organizations achieve compliance faster while mitigating risks – and reducing costs across the entire organization.