It has been five years since the Department of Homeland Security introduced the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS), a program designed to secure the nation's chemical infrastructure by identifying high risk chemical facilities and requiring them to implement risk-based performance standards.

The current state of the access control infrastructure at many enterprise companies might best be described as fractured. Multiple disparate physical and logical access control systems and cumbersome manual processes are all too common. While standardizing on a single system corporate-wide might address one symptom of the problem, it would require a huge capital outlay to rip and replace multiple systems.