NERC compliance requirements in the utilities industry have made it essential to monitor and report on physical access to various facilities, control rooms, substations and critical assets.

UTILCO, a major utility in the SUS, completed a large merger with a like-size utility. As the operations were being combined, UTILCO wanted to have a system that allowed its corporate security managers to utilize job roles to decide who has access to specific facilities and how much area access they should have within those facilities. Additionally, they were going through an end-of-life on their existing access control systems. They faced the challenge of unifying access management across two large employee populations merging into one company.

The Enterprise Guardian™ solution from AlertEnterprise was selected for its ability to maintain enterprise roles for every employee and make any changes to underlying badging systems totally transparent to the users.

Readily available connectors to existing badging systems allowed information to be consolidated in the AlertEnterprise identity repository. Security managers could now enroll identities, and manage badges from one place to deliver a single comprehensive, unified badge access system for the requesting and granting of physical access across the entire enterprise.

UTILCO now can apply uniform policies across all its facilities with regards to NERC and FERC rules. AlertEnterprise is the system of record for a large user base comprised of employees, contractors, visitors and contingent workers.

With AlertEnterprise, UTILCO could extend the useful life of its legacy systems, ease the process of migration to new systems for enterprise-wide access control, and meet compliance requirements. Eliminating the need to separately manage multiple systems reduces cost while reducing risk and enhancing security across the organization.