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Automation cures Pearson’s security pain points |
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Written by Vawn Himmelsbach
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Monday, 23 February 2009 |
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Page 1 of 3
 The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) is responsible for overseeing the airport’s Pass/Permit Control Office (PPCO), which administers restricted area identification cards, access control cards and permits for each of the approximately 33,000 employees at the airport – from airline employees to shopkeepers to food vendors to contractors. There’s a lot of turnaround at the airport, and the PPCO serves an average of 175 clients per day – which works out to more than 45,000 employees and contractors per year – for a variety of pass/permit requests.
The GTAA had a number of disparate physical security systems that
didn’t talk to one another. So it rolled out a software suite for
identity management and access control systems, which manages security
identities, compliance and events across these disparate systems.
“It’s so fast-moving, how do you manage that access control without
making any mistakes, without relying on a human being?” says Ajay Jain,
CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based Quantum Secure, which offers an
integrated policy platform for all underlying subsystems in a physical
security infrastructure, from identity management to enterprise
resource planning — just what the GTAA was looking for.
The lineups and processing time at the PPCO had increased beyond
acceptable levels – it was taking 560 minutes to process one
pass/permit request. The reason? It was using an in-house system that
was cobbled together by various contractors over a number of years,
which was limited in scope and had come to the end of its life.
“We were using a home-built inventory system along with a large number
of other systems, so we had six or seven systems we were managing with
individual data in each system,” said Bryan Scott, senior manager of
security infrastructures with the GTAA.
Scott was looking to transform this system of siloed applications that
shared common and related information into a single overall management
system, automating all manual processes and streamlining operations, to
cut down the time required to process access cards, identity cards and
pass/permits.
It was also looking for a system that would address the next 10 to 15
years of growth at Toronto Pearson, and move it toward more of an
automated compliance-related framework while decreasing the cost of
operations.
Through an open tendering process, it chose a proposal from Deloitte
& Touche Canada using Quantum Secure’s SAFE technology.
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