Veterans Affairs taps Quantum Secure, Electrosoft for physical access
21 May, 2013
category: Government, Smart Cards
Virginia-based Electrosoft Services, in partnership with Quantum Secure, has been chosen to provide an Enterprise Physical Access Control System to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Quantum has deployed four of its employees to assist with the project on a part-time basis, while main contractor Electrosoft and its primary partner Deloitte are providing the majority of professional services.
An enterprise physical access control system has been designed for deployment across VA’s worldwide facilities, but the initial contract will cover 20 locations in the national capital region. While the exact number is yet to be defined, Quantum Secure estimates that the project will initially include 5,000 doors.
More impressive than the number of doors included in the pilot is the number of identities that Quantum Secure plans to log. Upon full roll out, all 440,000 identities of VA employees along with contractors carrying PIV cards will be loaded into SAFE for enterprise use across the more than 1,000 VA locations.
The contract with VA will feature integration and automation by SAFE for physical access control within the national capital region only— a list of about 20 VA locations that includes the Department’s headquarters and numerous hospitals. SAFE will connect to VA’s internal database of identities and PIV data and will provision physical access according to VA policy and business processes.
The primary FICAM use cases will be supported, including automated on-boarding and off-boarding into PACS, electronic visitor management and lifecycle privilege management.
Quantum Secure’s SAFE solution enables user to manage security identities, compliance and events across disparate physical security systems. The solution at VA will include the following components of the SAFE platform of solutions:
SAFE Physical Identity and Access Manager (PIAM). Based on open standards and policy-based architecture, PIAM enables centralized “Access Privileges” management as well as role and time based access control rules across all physical security systems. PIAM for PIV enables security managers to create FIPS 201-compliant processes and policies to grant, manage, revoke and provision security identities and access privileges across disparate physical access control system (PACS) vendors.
SAFE Self-Service Portal. Self-Service for PIV alleviates administrative burden associated with requesting, approving, entering, updating and deleting cardholder information across disparate PACS systems. Self-Service delivers a request and approval channel for making physical access requests, approvals or denials direct to any PIV cardholder via a web-based, graphical user interface. Self-Service also eliminates manual processes as changes and requests are conducted based on deployed policies.
SAFE Visitor Management. Visitor management supports all employees, contractors and visitors at small or large organizations to manage and track personnel as they enter and exit the government facilities. The system is FIPS 201-compliant and provides a web-based interface that accepts all FIPS credentials— PIV, TWIC, CAC Cards (CAC, CAC Transitional, CACNextGen), FRAC, State-issued Driver Licenses, E-Passports as well as machine readable and biometric passports.
SAFE’s visitor management solution performs checks to verify the validity of the credential and confirms the status of the certificates held on the credential. Once this has been accomplished, the system either registers the FIPS credential into the local PACS or prints a visitor badge based on local or central security policies.
SAFE Security Reporter. SAFE Reporting provides reports and dashboards on a daily, weekly or monthly basis that cover operational and management information for use by security departments. SAFE’s Custom Report Wizard tool allows a security manager to create customized reports online and receive immediate results in a secure, confidential manner.