(2-Nov-10) Delivering packages to customers in a timely fashion takes more than a good shipping label.
In the case of FedEx (FDX), employees often need special IDs to make deliveries, such as the Secure Identification Display Area (SIDA) badges required to access restricted airport areas. For years, FedEx relied on 121 security administrators to manually provision and deprovision SIDA badges as well as proximity cards for parking-lot access and photo IDs for building access.
The system helped prevent security breaches, but FedEx’s process for retrieving badges and disabling access for inactive or terminated employees “wasn’t centralized and easy to audit,” says Denise Wood, FedEx’s CISO. The result, she says, were gaps in deprovisioning that not only posed a security threat, but could have required FedEx to re-badge approximately 60,000 employees in the event of an audit.