What is precision access control?

When it comes to access control, organizations have primarily been focused around the Role-based access control in which the admin allocates access rights to employees by first creating an access group, which is a combination of time zone (time of day+ days of a week +holidays) and reader group(s).
Role-based access control is highly secure and convenient as the admin does not have to remember that access to which set of doors has to be provided to an employee of a specific role. Moreover, it restricts wrong allocation of access rights. However, there is one big disadvantage that it’s very complex to assign access to a particular door which in general does not map to his/her role.

To tackle this problem, more advanced access control systems started providing a combination of role-based and discretionary access control. Therefore an administrator may allocate access rights based on precision access control functionality along with access groups.

Precision access control works by allocating specific reader or reader groups and time schedule to an employee, eliminating the need for the admin to create a separate access group for the same.

Let’s say, a software engineer requires access to a server room, which is not included in his access group. Using precision access control, an administrator, at his discretion, can provide access to the server room without including it in any access group.