Access control is easy to get wrong in the direction of either too loose or too painful. Hand out master cards to avoid complaints and you have no real security; lock everything down and people prop doors open to get work done. The goal is quiet, correct access that people barely notice.
Least privilege, by default
Give each person access to the doors their role needs and nothing more. It is tempting to grant broad access "just in case", but every extra door is extra risk and one more thing to clean up when someone leaves.
Model access by role and area rather than person by person. When someone changes team, you change their role, and their doors follow automatically.
One identity across the building
Access, attendance and visitors should share a single identity. When they live in separate systems, a leaver keeps a working card because someone forgot to disable it in one of them.
With one identity, joining, moving and leaving update every door at once, and revocation is instant everywhere, not a checklist across three tools.
Assume you will need the logs
Sooner or later you will need to answer "who opened this door, and when". Log every access event and keep it searchable. A system that controls doors but cannot tell you what happened is only half a system.
Review access periodically. A quick quarterly look for people with access they no longer need catches the drift that every building accumulates.
Key takeaways
- Grant least privilege and model access by role, not by person.
- Put access, attendance and visitors on one identity so revocation is instant everywhere.
- Log every door event and keep it searchable.
- Review access quarterly to catch privilege drift.
See how Trezod does this in practice.
See access control