One person, 6 records: why access lists never add up

Ask a security team how many people can enter their site today. You will usually get a range.

Someone has looked. The answer just depends on which system you ask.

How 1 person ends up with 6 records

Take someone who came in twice for job interviews, then worked on site as a contractor. They were hired 18 months later and now work at 2 sites.

The contractor platform still lists them under their previous employer. The visitor book has them twice, spelled slightly differently. The human resources system knows them as an employee, with its own number. Each site's access system holds a cardholder record from the day their badge was issued there.

That's 6 records for 1 person, and no 2 of them share an identifier. Nobody was careless. Every record was created properly, by a different process, for a different reason.

Why the usual fixes don't last

The usual fix is a periodic clean-up. You export from every system, match on name and date of birth, remove the duplicates and report a clean number.

It holds for about a week.

Names are unreliable when they're transliterated, hyphenated or typed by different people. Dates of birth are worse, because most access control systems don't store them. Even a perfect match is a snapshot. It starts going out of date as soon as someone joins, leaves or changes employer.

The other fix is to make 1 system the master. That fails too, because no existing system holds all 4 groups of people. Human resources doesn't hold visitors. Contractor management doesn't hold employees. Whatever you choose, the other systems keep creating records outside it.

1 record, tied to a reason

We start an identity record from a reason: a job, a contractor assignment with an approved scope, a visit invitation, a regular delivery.

A reason has an owner, a start date and an end date. That is what makes it useful.

The same record then covers every group. Someone who visits, comes back as a contractor and is later hired keeps 1 record all along. Each change is checked against the rules that now apply. Their history stays with them, whichever badge they carried at the time.

Requirements belong to the reason and the area. Inductions, certificates, screening and permits come in from the systems that manage them. Eligibility follows from that.

What changes

You can count the people who can get in, whenever you like. There is 1 record per person, and each one knows whether that person is eligible today.

Access reviews stop showing a manager 3 versions of the same person.

Evacuation lists become reliable. The count of who is on site comes from the same record that let them in.

The original question finally gets a proper answer. Every access system can tell you how many badges are active. Now you can also say how many people can walk in.

The access governance scorecard asks how you count the people on your sites today. It takes 5 minutes. Take the scorecard Talk to us