Features To Help You Achieve Speed and Accuracy In Vetting
Proper visitor vetting is vital for a practical security solution. And unless the answer is to entirely seal your premises and never allow foot traffic in or out, a decision must be made whether an individual should be granted access past your facility’s barrier to entry. At one point in time, it was incredibly easy to make that decision. When someone in the facility vouched for the private visitor, access was permitted without a second thought. This is, however, a method that does not work anymore. For a facility to be termed secure, it should have the ability to screen individuals and establish their suitability for admission into the facility. Besides being a form of good practice for most federal facilities, it is also the law.
When it comes to speed and accuracy in vetting, it is important to have solutions to speed up this process. Here are some aspects to look for in a visitor management system if you are looking to achieve speed and accuracy in vetting.
System Reliability
The main problem experienced with the vetting of visitors is the reliability of the system in use. It is utterly awful for your organization to have to revert to a paper-based vetting process just because the system in place cannot be relied upon when it is needed the most. Think of this situation: your organization gathers all the data required for a particular visitor, but at the vetting stage, you cannot identify the visitor. Besides wasting the visitor’s time, you have also spent much of your staff’s time by consuming resources that increase the vulnerability of your premises. If you’re an organization that performs visitor vetting on a daily basis, you must look for a system with a 99% uptime. Your vetting system should not go down just because there is an influx in the number of people to be screened.
Integration With Other Security Databases
When vetting is a mandatory requirement for civilians and all visitors accessing your premises, it is essential to have a system that makes it possible for you to obtain information from many other security databases. For instance, if your organization is required to provide criminal and felon histories, it is essential to have a system that can be integrated to the NCIC-III database to crosscheck a visitor’s information among the more than 12 million active records stored in the database. In addition to this, your system should have the capability to access the Interstate Identification Index for a list of criminal histories that are probably not present in the NCIC database.
Hosting
While some organizations will opt for an on-premise vetting solution, there are numerous incentives to relocate to the cloud. Upgrading your civilian vetting system could be the right opportunity for you to make a cloud migration. Cloud environments are recommended for their high security and their adherence to all RMF requirements. There should also be the option for your systems to be hosted in the cloud or internally.
Real-Time Reporting
Vetting is a crucial aspect of maintaining the security of your organization. It is imperative that you go for a vetting system that provides real-time information about all the individuals screened. Real-time reporting ensures that all information about the individual is relayed to all relevant stakeholders as well as help in granting or denying access. With real-time reporting, the system should provide reporting on the number of badges issued to people in the organization, the number and reasons people were denied access to a facility, and the number and list of people with full access to every restricted area. Real-time reporting makes it possible for your organization to actively monitor the activities of your visitor’s while they are on-site.
Security vetting could be a lengthy process, particularly for organizations with strict guidelines and policies regarding granting access to visitors. Background checks are necessary because they help in scrutinizing the criminal record of an individual so that they are not a threat to the premise they will be accessing. All the information the organization has regarding the visitor should be thoroughly reviewed, and it is only after it that access to a premise is granted. If there are discrepancies in the information provided, the visitor will most likely be denied access.
